A multi-granularity ensemble algorithm for medical image classification based on broad learning system

Due to the complexity of medical images, traditional medical image classification methods have been unable to meet the actual application needs. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning theory has provided a technical approach for solving medical image classification. However, deep learning has the following problems in the application of medical image classification. First, it is impossible to construct a deep learning model with excellent performance according to the characteristics of medical images. Second, the current deep learning network structure and training strategies are less adaptable to medical images. Therefore, this paper first introduces the visual attention mechanism into the deep learning model so that the information can be extracted more effectively according to the problem of medical images, and the reasoning is realized at a finer granularity. It can increase the interpretability of the model. Additionally, to solve the problem of matching the deep learning network structure and training strategy to medical images, this paper will construct a novel multiscale convolutional neural network model that can automatically extract high-level discriminative appearance features from the original image, and the loss function uses the Mahalanobis distance optimization model to obtain a better training strategy, which can improve the robust performance of the network model. The medical image classification task is completed by the above method. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes a medical classification algorithm based on a visual attention mechanism-multiscale convolutional neural network. The lung nodules and breast cancer images were classified by the method in this paper. The experimental results show that the accuracy of medical image classification in this paper is not only higher than that of traditional machine learning methods but also improved compared with other deep learning methods, and the method has good stability and robustness.

Due to the complexity of medical images, traditional medical image classification methods have been unable to meet actual application needs. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning theory has provided a technical approach for solving medical image classification tasks. However, deep learning has the following problems in medical image classification. First, it is impossible to construct a deep learning model hierarchy for medical image properties; second, the network initialization weights of deep learning models are not well optimized. Therefore, this paper starts from the perspective of network optimization and improves the nonlinear modeling ability of the network through optimization methods. A new network weight initialization method is proposed, which alleviates the problem that existing deep learning model initialization is limited by the type of the nonlinear unit adopted and increases the potential of the neural network to handle different visual tasks. Moreover, through an in‐depth study of the multicolumn convolutional neural network framework, this paper finds that the number of features and the convolution kernel size at different levels of the convolutional neural network are different. In contrast, the proposed method can construct different convolutional neural network models that adapt better to the characteristics of the medical images of interest and thus can better train the resulting heterogeneous multicolumn convolutional neural networks. Finally, using the adaptive sliding window fusion mechanism proposed in this paper, both methods jointly complete the classification task of medical images. Based on the above ideas, this paper proposes a medical classification algorithm based on a weight initialization/sliding window fusion for multilevel convolutional neural networks. The methods proposed in this study were applied to breast mass, brain tumor tissue, and medical image database classification experiments. The results show that the proposed method not only achieves a higher average accuracy than that of traditional machine learning and other deep learning methods but also is more stable and more robust.

Medical imaging is an indispensable tool in clinical diagnosis and therapeutic decision-making, encompassing a wide range of modalities such as radiography, ultrasound, CT, and MRI. With the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, significant progress has been made in medical image analysis. However, existing deep learning methods are often limited by dataset size, which can lead to overfitting, while traditional approaches relying on hand-crafted features lack specificity and fail to fully capture complex pathological information. To address these challenges, we propose RadioGuide-DCN, an innovative radiomics-guided decorrelated classification network. Our method integrates radiomics features as prior information into deep neural networks and employs a feature decorrelation loss mechanism combined with an anti-attention feature fusion module to effectively reduce feature redundancy and enhance the model's capacity to capture both local details and global patterns. Specifically, we utilize a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) classifier with learnable activation functions to further boost performance across various medical imaging datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RadioGuide-DCN achieves an accuracy of 93.63% in BUSI image classification and consistently outperforms conventional radiomics and deep learning methods in multiple medical imaging classification tasks, significantly improving classification accuracy and AUC scores. Our study offers a novel paradigm for integrating deep learning with traditional imaging approaches and holds broad clinical application potential, particularly in tumor detection, image classification, and disease diagnosis.

Accurate and interpretable AI models play a critical role in medical image analysis. However, despite advancements in explainable AI (XAI), existing methods struggle with inconsistent interpretability. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Integrated Latent and Attention Mapping (ILAM) framework, which enhances both classification accuracy and explainability by fusing local and global feature representations. ILAM integrates a custom-designed Autoencoder (AE) with a Vision Transformer (ViT), where the AE learns fine-grained local features through unsupervised patchwise image reconstruction in the latent space. These local features are then fused with global representations extracted by ViT, creating a hybrid model that improves both performance and post hoc interpretability. To refine explainability, ILAM incorporates a modified attention rollout mechanism, which recursively aggregates latent feature representations and attention weights to produce precise and stable activation maps. We evaluate ILAM on three publicly available medical imaging datasets-BreakHis, Chest X-Ray, and Retinal, demonstrating its superior performance over transformer-based models such as ViT, DeiT, CvT, and SwinT. ILAM consistently generates detailed and reliable activation maps, providing clearer visualizations of critical image regions influencing model decisions. By effectively combining local and global feature fusion, ILAM establishes itself as a robust and interpretable framework for medical image classification.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained tremendous popularity for various imaging related tasks such as artificial image generation to support AI training. GANs are especially useful for medical imaging-related tasks where training datasets are usually limited in size and heavily imbalanced against the diseased class. We present a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of recent GAN architectures used for medical image analysis to help the readers in making an informed decision before employing GANs in developing medical image classification and segmentation models. We have extracted 54 papers that highlight the capabilities and application of GANs in medical imaging from January 2015 to August 2020 and inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Our results show four main architectures of GAN that are used for segmentation or classification in medical imaging. We provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in the application of GANs in clinical diagnosis through medical image segmentation and classification and ultimately share experiences for task-based GAN implementations.

This paper addresses the task of class-imbalanced medical image classification using complication labels. Medical image classification plays an essential role in improving patient care and reducing the burden on healthcare systems, along with other computer aided diagnosis tasks. However, there are two common obstacles with medical image image classification. One is that there is a high cost of acquiring annotations from doctors/experts. Two is that in many cases there is a differences in the number of incidents that appear per symptom which lead to class-imbalance. The above factors make medical image classification difficult to deal with. Additionally, there are cases where multiple symptoms appear in a mixed manner (complications), such as diabetic complications where both symptoms of infection and ischaemia could appear at the same time, which also could influence the classification result negatively. In this paper, a method that jointly tackles the obstacles mentioned above is presented. First, we conduct extensive experiment with various class-imbalanced learning methods introduced in previous works and also propose a method that improves the baseline class-imbalanced approaches by utilizing complication labels in pre-training. Second, we validate the proposed method with the diabetic foot ulcer dataset introduced in Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge 2021.

Image patch classification is an important task in many different medical imaging applications. In this work, we have designed a customized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with shallow convolution layer to classify lung image patches with interstitial lung disease (ILD). While many feature descriptors have been proposed over the past years, they can be quite complicated and domain-specific. Our customized CNN framework can, on the other hand, automatically and efficiently learn the intrinsic image features from lung image patches that are most suitable for the classification purpose. The same architecture can be generalized to perform other medical image or texture classification tasks.

Deep Learning has radically transformed the field of Medical Image Analysis by surpassing human performance in several challenging classification tasks and thus has widespread applications in industry and academia. In this work, we employ a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) that uses Transfer Learning and is trained using the Open-access Medical Image Repositories and OpenI repository. We use DCNN to assist in a crowdsourced Big Data platform by conducting two crucial classification tasks: (1) Interclass classification of the type of the medical image—MRI, Ultrasound or X-Ray; (2) Intraclass classification of the X-Ray images into chest or abdomen X-Rays. Our approach automates the classification process of medical images, to provide certified medical experts with medical images of individuals on a crowdsourced platform, along with similar medical images of the suspected medical condition for validation, in order to enhance diagnostic effectiveness. In this work, we focus primarily on the classification tasks using DCNN; the elucidation of the privacy-preserving architecture of our cloud-based crowdsourcing platform and classification using conventional clustering approaches in the absence of large training images is deferred to future work.KeywordsBig dataDeep learningDCNNCrowdsourcingMedical image classificationObject detection

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) enable learning trainable, highly representative and hierarchical image feature from sufficient training data which makes rapid progress in computer vision possible. There are currently three major techniques that successfully employ CNNs to medical image classification: training the CNN from scratch, using off-the-shelf pretrained CNN features, and transfer learning , i.e., fine-tuning CNN models pretrained from natural image dataset (such as large-scale annotated natural image database: ImageNet) to medical image tasks. In this chapter, we exploit three important factors of employing deep convolutional neural networks to computer-aided detection problems. First, we exploit and evaluate several different CNN architectures including from shallower to deeper CNNs: classical CifarNet, to recent AlexNet and state-of-the-art GoogLeNet and their variants. The studied models contain five thousand to 160 million parameters and vary in the numbers of layers. Second, we explore the influence of dataset scales and spatial image context configurations on medical image classification performance. Third, when and why transfer learning from the pretrained ImageNet CNN models (via fine-tuning) can be useful for medical imaging tasks are carefully examined. We study two specific computer-aided detection (CADe) problems, namely thoracoabdominal lymph node (LN) detection and interstitial lung disease (ILD) classification. We achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the mediastinal LN detection and report the first fivefold cross-validation classification results on predicting axial CT slices with ILD categories. Our extensive quantitative evaluation, CNN model analysis, and empirical insights can be helpful to the design of high-performance CAD systems for other medical imaging tasks, without loss of generality.

Due to the high availability of large-scale annotated image datasets, paramount progress has been made in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification tasks. CNNs enable learning highly representative and hierarchical local image features directly from data. However, the availability of annotated data, especially in the medical imaging domain, remains the biggest challenge in the field. Transfer learning can provide a promising and effective solution by transferring knowledge from generic image recognition tasks to the medical image classification. However, due to irregularities in the dataset distribution, transfer learning usually fails to provide a robust solution. Class decomposition facilitates easier to learn class boundaries of a dataset, and consequently can deal with any irregularities in the data distribution. Motivated by this challenging problem, the paper presents Decompose, Transfer, and Compose (DeTraC) approach, a novel CNN architecture based on class decomposition to improve the performance of medical image classification using transfer learning and class decomposition approach. DeTraC enables learning at the subclass level that can be more separable with a prospect to faster convergence.We validated our proposed approach with three different cohorts of chest X-ray images, histological images of human colorectal cancer, and digital mammograms. We compared DeTraC with the state-of-the-art CNN models to demonstrate its high performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.

Medical image classification: Knowledge transfer via residual U-Net and vision transformer-based teacher-student model with knowledge distillation

Medical image classification is essential for contemporary clinical diagnosis and decision support systems. However, medical images generally have similar inter-class features and complex structure patterns, making it a challenging task. While both local and global features are critical for noise reduction and discriminative pattern extraction in medical images, conventional approaches exhibit limitations. Specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focus on local features extraction but lack a comprehensive understanding of global semantic. Conversely, vision transformers (ViTs) can model long-range feature dependencies but may cause disruption to local features. To address these limitations, we propose Hierarchical Enhanced Multi-attention Feature (HEMF), an adaptive hierarchical enhanced multi-attention feature fusion framework to synergistically extract and fuse multi-scale local and global features. It comprises two core components: (1) the enhanced local and global feature extraction modules to extract multi-scale local and global features in parallel; (2) the hierarchical enhanced feature fusion module integrating a novel attention mechanism named Mixed Attention (MA) and a novel inverted residual block named Squeezed Inverted Residual Multi-Layer Perceptron (SIRMLP) to effectively fuse multi-scale features. Experimental results demonstrate that with nearly minimal model parameters compared to other advanced models, HEMF achieves the accuracy and F1-score of 87.34% and 78.89% on the ISIC2018 dataset, 87.03% and 87.02% on the Kvasir dataset, and 82.26% and 82.20% on the COVID-19 CT dataset, which are the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is open source and available from https://github.com/Esgjgd/HEMF.

Deep learning methods, especially convolutional neural networks, have become more and more popular in medical image classifications. However, training a deep neural network from scratch can be a luxury for many medical image datasets as the process requires a large and well-balanced sample to output satisfactory results. Unlike natural image datasets, medical images are expensive to collect owing to labor and equipment costs. Besides, the class labels in medical image datasets are usually severely imbalanced subject to the availability of patients. Further, aggregating medical images from multiple sources can be challenging due to policy restrictions, privacy concerns, communication costs, and data heterogeneity caused by equipment differences and labeling discrepancies. In this paper, we propose to address these issues with the help of transfer learning and artificial samples created by generative models. Instead of requesting medical images from source data, our method only needs a parsimonious supplement of model parameters pre-trained on the source data. The proposed method preserves the data privacy in the source data and significantly reduces the communication cost. Our study shows transfer learning together with artificial samples can improve the pneumonia classification accuracy on a small but heavily imbalanced chest X-ray image dataset by \(11.53\%\) which performs even better than directly augmenting that source data into the training process.KeywordsDeep learningGenerative modelsMedical image classificationPrivacy preservationTransfer learning

Along with the development of medical imaging technology, medical image analysis has become a crucial part of clinical diagnosis. However, traditional image analysis methods rely on manual feature extraction and expert evaluation, triggering problems such as low efficiency and lack of accuracy. Deep learning techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have made significant breakthroughs in medical image analysis in recent years. The aim of this paper is to study the application of deep learning in medical imaging, and explore the advantages and development potential in early disease diagnosis, image segmentation and feature extraction. This paper reviews the basic principles of deep learning and analyses the applicability of deep learning in medical imaging by combining the characteristics of medical imaging. Through systematic analysis of existing literature, this paper summarises the remarkable achievements of deep learning in processing, analysing and applying it to various medical images, such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and so on. It has been shown that deep learning methods can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical image processing and demonstrate performance due to traditional methods in tasks such as classification. However, how to improve the interpretability of models and the generalisability of clinical applications are still current research hotspots and challenges.

Recently, broad learning system (BLS) have demonstrated excellent performance in hyperspectral images (HSI) classification. However, due to the complex geometric structure and spatial layout of HSI, the linear sparse features in broad learning system are difficult to fully represent hyperspectral data. In addition, the features learned by broad learning system lack more effective discriminative ability, which leads to the limited expressive ability of features. To address the issues, we propose a graph convolutional enhanced discriminative broad learning system (GCDBLS) for HSI Classification. GCDBLS aggregates the node information in the adjacency graph through graph convolution, and then learns the context relationship, so as to obtain rich nonlinear spatial spectral features in hyperspectral images; In order to extract more discriminative hyperspectral image features, GCDBLS introduces the concept of local intra-class scatter and local inter-class scatter. By minimizing the local intra-class feature distance and maximizing the local inter-class feature distance, GCDBLS can improve the discrimination ability of BLS extracted features. On three HSI datasets, the experiments compared with the latest classification methods show that the proposed method achieves good results, and improves the classification performance of hyperspectral images.