Comparative performance analysis of binary variants of FOX optimization algorithm with half-quadratic ensemble ranking method for thyroid cancer detection.

Thyroid cancer is a life-threatening condition that arises from the cells of the thyroid gland located in the neck's frontal region just below the adam's apple. While it is not as prevalent as other types of cancer, it ranks prominently among the commonly observed cancers affecting the endocrine system. Machine learning has emerged as a valuable medical diagnostics tool specifically for detecting thyroid abnormalities. Feature selection is of vital importance in the field of machine learning as it serves to decrease the data dimensionality and concentrate on the most pertinent features. This process improves model performance, reduces training time, and enhances interpretability. This study examined binary variants of FOX-optimization algorithms for feature selection. The study employed eight transfer functions (S and V shape) to convert the FOX-optimization algorithms into their binary versions. The vision transformer-based pre-trained models (DeiT and Swin Transformer) are used for feature extraction. The extracted features are transformed using locally linear embedding, and binary FOX-optimization algorithms are applied for feature selection in conjunction with the Naïve Bayes classifier. The study utilized two datasets (ultrasound and histopathological) related to thyroid cancer images. The benchmarking is performed using the half-quadratic theory-based ensemble ranking technique. Two TOPSIS-based methods (H-TOPSIS and A-TOPSIS) are employed for initial model ranking, followed by an ensemble technique for final ranking. The problem is treated as multi-objective optimization task with accuracy, F2-score, AUC-ROC and feature space size as optimization goals. The binary FOX-optimization algorithm based on the [Formula: see text] transfer function achieved superior performance compared to other variants using both datasets as well as feature extraction techniques. The proposed framework comprised a Swin transformer to extract features, a Fox optimization algorithm with a V1 transfer function for feature selection, and a Naïve Bayes classifier and obtained the best performance for both datasets. The best model achieved an accuracy of 94.75%, an AUC-ROC value of 0.9848, an F2-Score of 0.9365, an inference time of 0.0353 seconds, and selected 5 features for the ultrasound dataset. For the histopathological dataset, the diagnosis model achieved an overall accuracy of 89.71%, an AUC-ROC score of 0.9329, an F2-Score of 0.8760, an inference time of 0.05141 seconds, and selected 12 features. The proposed model achieved results comparable to existing research with small features space.

A Framework for Detecting Thyroid Cancer from Ultrasound and Histopathological Images Using Deep Learning, Meta-Heuristics, and MCDM Algorithms.

Computer-assisted diagnostic systems have been developed to aid doctors in diagnosing thyroid-related abnormalities. The aim of this research is to improve the diagnosis accuracy of thyroid abnormality detection models that can be utilized to alleviate undue pressure on healthcare professionals. In this research, we proposed deep learning, metaheuristics, and a MCDM algorithms-based framework to detect thyroid-related abnormalities from ultrasound and histopathological images. The proposed method uses three recently developed deep learning techniques (DeiT, Swin Transformer, and Mixer-MLP) to extract features from the thyroid image datasets. The feature extraction techniques are based on the Image Transformer and MLP models. There is a large number of redundant features that can overfit the classifiers and reduce the generalization capabilities of the classifiers. In order to avoid the overfitting problem, six feature transformation techniques (PCA, TSVD, FastICA, ISOMAP, LLE, and UMP) are analyzed to reduce the dimensionality of the data. There are five different classifiers (LR, NB, SVC, KNN, and RF) evaluated using the 5-fold stratified cross-validation technique on the transformed dataset. Both datasets exhibit large class imbalances and hence, the stratified cross-validation technique is used to evaluate the performance. The MEREC-TOPSIS MCDM technique is used for ranking the evaluated models at different analysis stages. In the first stage, the best feature extraction and classification techniques are chosen, whereas, in the second stage, the best dimensionality reduction method is evaluated in wrapper feature selection mode. Two best-ranked models are further selected for the weighted average ensemble learning and features selection using the recently proposed meta-heuristics FOX-optimization algorithm. The PCA+FOX optimization-based feature selection + random forest model achieved the highest TOPSIS score and performed exceptionally well with an accuracy of 99.13%, F2-score of 98.82%, and AUC-ROC score of 99.13% on the ultrasound dataset. Similarly, the model achieved an accuracy score of 90.65%, an F2-score of 92.01%, and an AUC-ROC score of 95.48% on the histopathological dataset. This study exploits the combination novelty of different algorithms in order to improve the thyroid cancer diagnosis capabilities. This proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art diagnostic methods for thyroid-related abnormalities in ultrasound and histopathological datasets and can significantly aid medical professionals by reducing the excessive burden on the medical fraternity.

Imbalanced ECG signal-based heart disease classification using ensemble machine learning technique.

The machine learning (ML)-based classification models are widely utilized for the automated detection of heart diseases (HDs) using various physiological signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG), magnetocardiography (MCG), heart sound (HS), and impedance cardiography (ICG) signals. However, ECG-based HD identification is the most common one used by clinicians. In the current investigation, the ECG records or subjects have been sampled and are used as inputs to the classification model to distinguish between normal and abnormal patients. The study has employed an imbalanced number of ECG samples for training the various classification models. Few ML methods such as support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) which have been rarely used for HD detection have been selected. The performance of the developed model has been evaluated in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and area under curve (AUC) values using ECG signals of subjects given in publicly available (PTB-ECG, MIT-BIH) datasets. Ranking of the models has been assigned based on these performance metrics and it is found that the AdaBoost and LR classifiers stand in first and second positions. These two models have been ensembled based on the majority voting principle and the performance measure of this ensemble model has also been determined. It is, in general, observed that the proposed ensemble model demonstrates the best HD detection performance of 0.946, 0.949, and 0.951 for the PTB-ECG dataset and 0.921, 0.926, and 0.950 for the MIT-BIH dataset in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and AUC, respectively. The proposed methodology can also be employed for the classification of HD using ICG, MCG, and HS signals as inputs. Further, the proposed methodology can also be applied to the detection of other diseases.