CNN-O-ELMNet: Optimized Lightweight and Generalized Model for Lung Disease Classification and Severity Assessment

The high burden of lung diseases on healthcare necessitates effective detection methods. Current Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are limited by their focus on specific diseases and computationally demanding deep learning models. To overcome these challenges, we introduce CNN-O-ELMNet, a lightweight classification model designed to efficiently detect various lung diseases, surpassing the limitations of disease-specific CAD systems and the complexity of deep learning models. This model combines a convolutional neural network for deep feature extraction with an optimized extreme learning machine, utilizing the imperialistic competitive algorithm for enhanced predictions. We then evaluated the effectiveness of CNN-O-ELMNet using benchmark datasets for lung diseases: distinguishing pneumothorax vs. non-pneumothorax, tuberculosis vs. normal, and lung cancer vs. healthy cases. Our findings demonstrate that CNN-O-ELMNet significantly outperformed (p < 0.05) state-of-the-art methods in binary classifications for tuberculosis and cancer, achieving accuracies of 97.85% and 97.7%, respectively, while maintaining low computational complexity with only 2481 trainable parameters.We also extended themodel to categorize lung disease severity based on Brixia scores. Achieving a 96.2% accuracy in multi-class assessment for mild, moderate, and severe cases, makes it suitable for deployment in lightweight healthcare devices.