Deep Feature Fusion and Optimization-Based Approach for Stomach Disease Classification

Cancer is the deadliest disease among all the diseases and the main cause of human mortality. Several types of cancer sicken the human body and affect organs. Among all the types of cancer, stomach cancer is the most dangerous disease that spreads rapidly and needs to be diagnosed at an early stage. The early diagnosis of stomach cancer is essential to reduce the mortality rate. The manual diagnosis process is time-consuming, requires many tests, and the availability of an expert doctor. Therefore, automated techniques are required to diagnose stomach infections from endoscopic images. Many computerized techniques have been introduced in the literature but due to a few challenges (i.e., high similarity among the healthy and infected regions, irrelevant features extraction, and so on), there is much room to improve the accuracy and reduce the computational time. In this paper, a deep-learning-based stomach disease classification method employing deep feature extraction, fusion, and optimization using WCE images is proposed. The proposed method comprises several phases: data augmentation performed to increase the dataset images, deep transfer learning adopted for deep features extraction, feature fusion performed on deep extracted features, fused feature matrix optimized with a modified dragonfly optimization method, and final classification of the stomach disease was performed. The features extraction phase employed two pre-trained deep CNN models (Inception v3 and DenseNet-201) performing activation on feature derivation layers. Later, the parallel concatenation was performed on deep-derived features and optimized using the meta-heuristic method named the dragonfly algorithm. The optimized feature matrix was classified by employing machine-learning algorithms and achieved an accuracy of 99.8% on the combined stomach disease dataset. A comparison has been conducted with state-of-the-art techniques and shows improved accuracy.