A novel hybrid deep learning and chaotic dynamics approach for thyroid cancer classification

Timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial in addressing the global rise in thyroid cancer, ensuring effective treatment strategies and improved patient outcomes. We present an intelligent classification method that couples an Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau (CDF9/7) wavelets whose detail coefficients are modulated by an n-scroll chaotic system to enrich discriminative features. We evaluate on the public DDTI thyroid ultrasound dataset ([Formula: see text] images; 819 malignant / 819 benign) using 5-fold cross-validation, where the proposed method attains 98.17% accuracy, 98.76% sensitivity, 97.58% specificity, 97.55% F1-score, and an AUC of 0.9912. A controlled ablation shows that adding chaotic modulation to CDF9/7 improves accuracy by [Formula: see text] percentage points over a CDF9/7-only CNN (from 89.38 to 98.17%). To objectively position our approach, we trained state-of-the-art backbones on the same data and splits: EfficientNetV2-S (96.58% accuracy; AUC 0.987), Swin-T (96.41%; 0.986), ViT-B/16 (95.72%; 0.983), and ConvNeXt-T (96.94%; 0.987). Our method outperforms the best of these by [Formula: see text] points in accuracy and [Formula: see text] in AUC, while remaining computationally efficient (28.7 ms per image; 1125 MB peak VRAM). Robustness is further supported by cross-dataset testing on TCIA (accuracy 95.82%) and transfer to an ISIC skin-lesion subset ([Formula: see text] unique images, augmented to 2048; accuracy 97.31%). Explainability analyses (Grad-CAM, SHAP, LIME) highlight clinically relevant regions. Altogether, the wavelet-chaos-CNN pipeline delivers state-of-the-art thyroid ultrasound classification with strong generalization and practical runtime characteristics suitable for clinical integration.