Two-Phase Evolutionary Convolutional Neural Network Architecture Search for Medical Image Classification

Article Type

Research Article

Publication Title

IEEE Access

Abstract

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising achievements in various computer vision tasks. However, designing a CNN model architecture necessitates a high-domain knowledge expert, which can be difficult for new researchers while solving real-world problems like medical image diagnosis. Neural architecture search (NAS) is an approach to reduce human intervention by automatically designing CNN architecture. This study proposes a two-phase evolutionary framework to design a suitable CNN model for medical image classification named TPEvo-CNN. The proposed framework mainly focuses on architectural depth search and hyper-parameter settings of the layered architecture for the CNN model. In the first phase, differential evolution (DE) is applied to determine the optimal number of layers for a CNN architecture, which enhances faster convergence to achieve CNN model architectures. In the second phase, the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to fine-tune the hyper-parameter settings of the generated CNN layer architecture in the first phase. Crossover and mutation operations of GA are devised to explore the hyper-parameter search space. Also, an elitism selection strategy is introduced to select the potential hyper-parameters of the CNN architecture for the next generation. The suggested approach is experimented on six medical image datasets, including pneumonia, skin cancer, and four COVID-19 datasets, which are categorized based on image types and class numbers. The experimental findings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TPEvo-CNN model compared to existing hand-crafted, pre-trained, and NAS-based CNN models in terms of classification metrics, confusion matrix, radar plots, and statistical analysis.

First Page

115280

Last Page

115305

DOI

https://10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3323705

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Comments

Open Access, Gold

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