Generalized fractional optimization-based explainable lightweight CNN model for malaria disease classification

Over the past few decades, machine learning and deep learning (DL) have incredibly influenced a broader range of scientific disciplines. DL-based strategies have displayed superior performance in image processing compared to conventional standard methods, especially in healthcare settings. Among the biggest threats to global public health is the fast spread of malaria. The plasmodium falciparum infection, the disease origin causes the intestinal illness. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence techniques have made it possible to use visual data sets to quickly and effectively diagnose malaria which has also proven to be cost and time effective. In literature, several DL approaches have previously been used with good precision but suffer from computational inefficiency and interpretability. Therefore, this research proposes a generalized fractional order-based explainable lightweight convolutional neural network model to overcome these limitations. The fractional order optimization algorithms have proven worth in terms of estimation accuracy and convergence speed for different applications. The proposed fractional order optimizer-based model offers an improved solution to malaria disease diagnosis with a percentage accuracy of 95 % using the standard NIH dataset and outperforms the existing complex models concerning speed and effectiveness. The proposed fractionally optimized lightweight CNN model has shown substantial performance on the external MP-IDB dataset and M5 test set as well by achieving a generalized test accuracy of 92 % and 90.4 % which verifies the robustness and generalizability of the proposed solution under available circumstances. Moreover, the efficacy of the proposed lightweight architecture is endorsed through evaluation metrics of precision, recall, and F1-score.