DeepBCTPred: deep learning-based prediction of bladder cancer tissues from endoscopic images

Bladder cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide, affecting the tissues of the urinary bladder and posing a significant threat to patient survival and quality of life. Accurate classification of bladder cancer tissue is critical for early diagnosis and patient survival, yet conventional methods suffer from subjective interpretation and human error.

We propose DeepBCTPred, a novel deep learning framework that integrates handcrafted and learned features through a dual-branch architecture combining MobileNetV3 with a Feedforward Neural Network. Our approach incorporates Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) for feature selection and employs a genetic algorithm-based image generation pipeline for optimal data selection. DeepBCTPred achieved superior performance with 98.74% recall, 99.45% specificity, and 97.96% F1-score on the test dataset, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements ranging from 2% to 15% in recall, 1.3%-13.1% in F1-score, and 1.5%-16% in Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). This framework demonstrates strong potential for clinical implementation in bladder cancer diagnosis and may be extensible to other cancer types for enhanced precision medicine applications.

The training, validation, and test scripts are freely available at https://github.com/nafcoder/DeepBCTPred.