Accurate Liver Fibrosis Detection Through Hybrid MRMR-BiLSTM-CNN Architecture with Histogram Equalization and Optimization

Abstract

The early detection and accurate diagnosis of liver fibrosis, a progressive and potentially serious liver condition, are crucial for effective medical intervention. Invasive methods like biopsies for diagnosis can be risky and expensive. This research presents a novel computer-aided diagnosis model for liver fibrosis using a hybrid approach of minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR) feature selection, bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The proposed model involves multiple stages, including image acquisition, preprocessing, feature representation, fibrous tissue identification, and classification. Notably, histogram equalization is employed to enhance image quality by addressing variations in brightness levels. Performance evaluation encompasses a range of metrics such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1 score, and error rate. Comparative analyses with established methods like DCNN, ANN-FLI, LungNet22, and SDAE-GAN underscore the efficacy of the proposed model. The innovative integration of hybrid MRMR-BiLSTM-CNN architecture and the horse herd optimization algorithm significantly enhances accuracy and F1 score, even with small datasets. The model tackles the complexities of hyperparameter optimization through the IHO algorithm and reduces training time by leveraging MRMR feature selection. In practical application, the proposed hybrid MRMR-BiLSTM-CNN method demonstrates remarkable performance with a 97.8% accuracy rate in identifying liver fibrosis images. It exhibits high precision, sensitivity, specificity, and minimal error rate, showcasing its potential for accurate and non-invasive diagnosis.

Keywords: BiLSTM; CNN; Deep learning; Improved horse herd optimization algorithm; Liver fibrosis; MRI image.