Tomato is one of the most important vegetables worldwide. It is considered a mainstay of many countries’ economies. However, tomato crops are vulnerable to many diseases that lead to reducing or destroying production, and for this reason, early and accurate diagnosis of tomato diseases is very urgent. For this reason, many deep learning models have been developed to automate tomato leaf disease classification. Deep learning is far superior to traditional machine learning with loads of data, but traditional machine learning may outperform deep learning for limited training data. The authors propose a tomato leaf disease classification method by exploiting transfer learning and features concatenation. The authors extract features using pre-trained kernels (weights) from MobileNetV2 and NASNetMobile; then, they concatenate and reduce the dimensionality of these features using kernel principal component analysis. Following that, they feed these features into a conventional learning algorithm. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of concatenated features for boosting the performance of classifiers. The authors have evaluated the three most popular traditional machine learning classifiers, random forest, support vector machine, and multinomial logistic regression; among them, multinomial logistic regression achieved the best performance with an average accuracy of 97%.

Colon cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in women and the third most common cause of cancer death in men. Therefore, early detection of this cancer can lead to lower infection and death rates. In this research, we propose a new lightweight deep learning approach based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for efficient colon cancer detection. In our method, the input histopathological images are normalized before feeding them into our CNN model, and then colon cancer detection is performed. The efficiency of the proposed system is analyzed with publicly available histopathological images database and compared with the state-of-the-art existing methods for colon cancer detection. The result analysis demonstrates that the proposed deep model for colon cancer detection provides a higher accuracy of 99.50%, which is considered the best accuracy compared with the majority of other deep learning approaches. Because of this high result, the proposed approach is computationally efficient.

Brain tumors (BTs) are deadly diseases that can strike people of every age, all over the world. Every year, thousands of people die of brain tumors. Brain-related diagnoses require caution, and even the smallest error in diagnosis can have negative repercussions. Medical errors in brain tumor diagnosis are common and frequently result in higher patient mortality rates. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used for tumor evaluation and detection. However, MRI generates large amounts of data, making manual segmentation difficult and laborious work, limiting the use of accurate measurements in clinical practice. As a result, automated and dependable segmentation methods are required. Automatic segmentation and early detection of brain tumors are difficult tasks in computer vision due to their high spatial and structural variability. Therefore, early diagnosis or detection and treatment are critical. Various traditional Machine learning (ML) techniques have been used to detect various types of brain tumors. The main issue with these models is that the features were manually extracted. To address the aforementioned insightful issues, this paper presents a hybrid deep transfer learning (GN-AlexNet) model of BT tri-classification (pituitary, meningioma, and glioma). The proposed model combines GoogleNet architecture with the AlexNet model by removing the five layers of GoogleNet and adding ten layers of the AlexNet model, which extracts features and classifies them automatically. On the same CE-MRI dataset, the proposed model was compared to transfer learning techniques (VGG-16, AlexNet, SqeezNet, ResNet, and MobileNet-V2) and ML/DL. The proposed model outperformed the current methods in terms of accuracy and sensitivity (accuracy of 99.51% and sensitivity of 98.90%).

Breast cancer, a leading cause of female mortality worldwide, poses a significant health challenge. Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have revolutionized breast cancer pathology by enabling accurate image classification. Various imaging methods, such as mammography, CT, MRI, ultrasound, and biopsies, aid in breast cancer detection. Computer-assisted pathological image classification is of paramount importance for breast cancer diagnosis. This study introduces a novel approach to breast cancer histopathological image classification. It leverages modified pre-trained CNN models and attention mechanisms to enhance model interpretability and robustness, emphasizing localized features and enabling accurate discrimination of complex cases. Our method involves transfer learning with deep CNN models—Xception, VGG16, ResNet50, MobileNet, and DenseNet121—augmented with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). The pre-trained models are finetuned, and the two CBAM models are incorporated at the end of the pre-trained models. The models are compared to state-of-the-art breast cancer diagnosis approaches and tested for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The confusion matrices are used to evaluate and visualize the results of the compared models. They help in assessing the models’ performance. The test accuracy rates for the attention mechanism (AM) using the Xception model on the “BreakHis” breast cancer dataset are encouraging at 99.2% and 99.5%. The test accuracy for DenseNet121 with AMs is 99.6%. The proposed approaches also performed better than previous approaches examined in the related studies.

The domestication of animals and the cultivation of crops have been essential to human development throughout history, with the agricultural sector playing a pivotal role. Insufficient nutrition often leads to plant diseases, such as those affecting rice crops, resulting in yield losses of 20–40% of total production. These losses carry significant global economic consequences. Timely disease diagnosis is critical for implementing effective treatments and mitigating financial losses. However, despite technological advancements, rice disease diagnosis primarily depends on manual methods. In this study, we present a novel self-attention network (SANET) based on the ResNet50 architecture, incorporating a kernel attention mechanism for accurate AI-assisted rice disease classification. We employ attention modules to extract contextual dependencies within images, focusing on essential features for disease identification. Using a publicly available rice disease dataset comprising four classes (three disease types and healthy leaves), we conducted cross-validated classification experiments to evaluate our proposed model. The results reveal that the attention-based mechanism effectively guides the convolutional neural network (CNN) in learning valuable features, resulting in accurate image classification and reduced performance variation compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our SANET model achieved a test set accuracy of 98.71%, surpassing that of current leading models. These findings highlight the potential for widespread AI adoption in agricultural disease diagnosis and management, ultimately enhancing efficiency and effectiveness within the sector.

Maize ( Zea mays ) is a critical crop for global food security and economic stability. However, it is highly vulnerable to various diseases such as northern leaf blight, common rust, and maize lethal necrosis, which can lead to significant crop losses if not detected early. Traditional CNN-based models, while effective in extracting spatial features, often fail to capture subtle multi-scale variations necessary for distinguishing between disease symptoms. These models also suffer from high computational complexity when deeper layers are introduced to handle fine-grained details. Transformer-based models, on the other hand, provide long-range dependencies but come with significant computational overhead, limiting their use in real-time agricultural applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose MSCPNet, a novel architecture that combines a truncated MobileNetV2 backbone with a Multi-Scale Convolutional PoolFormer block. The truncated backbone ensures that only essential layers for general feature extraction are retained, enhancing the model’s adaptability across domains. The Multi-Scale Convolutional PoolFormer block captures both local and global dependencies through parallel convolutional branches of varying kernel sizes, while the PoolFormer module efficiently handles feature aggregation without the heavy computational cost associated with traditional attention mechanisms. This design allows the model to balance computational efficiency and high accuracy, making it highly suitable for real-time maize disease detection. Extensive evaluations on the maize leaf disease classification task yielded outstanding results, with the proposed MSCPNet achieving an accuracy of 97.44%, precision of 96.76%, recall of 97.37%, F1-score of 97.04%, and an MCC of 0.9653, with a model size of 998,084 parameters and 315,258,752 FLOPs. Furthermore, the model was evaluated on the PlantVillage dataset for tomato leaf disease classification, where it achieved an accuracy of 99.32%, precision of 99.32%, recall of 99.33%, F1-score of 99.32%, and an MCC of 0.9925. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MSCPNet in disease classification across different domains.