The utilization of computational models in the field of medical image classification is an ongoing and unstoppable trend, driven by the pursuit of aiding medical professionals in achieving swift and precise diagnoses. Post COVID-19, many researchers are studying better classification and diagnosis of lung diseases particularly, as it was reported that one of the very few diseases greatly affecting human beings was related to lungs. This research study, as presented in the paper, introduces an advanced computer-assisted model that is specifically tailored for the classification of 13 lung diseases using deep learning techniques, with a focus on analyzing chest radiograph images. The work flows from data collection, image quality enhancement, feature extraction to a comparative classification performance analysis. For data collection, an open-source data set consisting of 112,000 chest X-Ray images was used. Since, the quality of the pictures was significant for the work, enhanced image quality is achieved through preprocessing techniques such as Otsu-based binary conversion, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization-driven noise reduction, and Canny edge detection. Feature extraction incorporates connected regions, histogram of oriented gradients, gray-level co-occurrence matrix and Haar wavelet transformation, complemented by feature selection via regularized neighbourhood component analysis. The paper proposes an optimized hybrid model, improved Aquila optimization convolutional neural networks (CNN), which is a combination of optimized CNN and DENSENET121 with applied batch equalization, which provides novelty for the model compared with other similar works. The comparative evaluation of classification performance among CNN, DENSENET121 and the proposed hybrid model is also done to find the results. The findings highlight the proposed hybrid model's supremacy, boasting 97.00% accuracy, 94.00% precision, 96.00% sensitivity, 96.00% specificity and 95.00% F1-score. In the future, potential avenues encompass exploring explainable machine learning for discerning model decisions and optimizing performance through strategic model restructuring.
Keywords: Aquila optimizer; Canny edge detection; DENSENET121; batch equalization; chest X-ray; contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization; lung disease; otsu.