AHA-AO: Artificial Hummingbird Algorithm with Aquila Optimization for Efficient Feature Selection in Medical Image Classification

This paper presents a system for medical image diagnosis that uses transfer learning (TL) and feature selection techniques. The main aim of TL on pre-trained models such as MobileNetV3 is to extract features from raw images. Here, a novel feature selection optimization algorithm called the Artificial Hummingbird Algorithm based on Aquila Optimization (AHA-AO) is proposed. The AHA-AO is used to select only the most relevant features and ensure the improvement of the overall model classification. Our methodology was evaluated using four datasets, namely, ISIC-2016, PH2, Chest-XRay, and Blood-Cell. We compared the proposed feature selection algorithm with five of the most popular feature selection optimization algorithms. We obtained an accuracy of 87.30% for the ISIC-2016 dataset, 97.50% for the PH2 dataset, 86.90% for the Chest-XRay dataset, and 88.60% for the Blood-cell dataset. The AHA-AO outperformed the other optimization techniques. Moreover, the developed AHA-AO was faster than the other feature selection models during the process of determining the relevant features. The proposed feature selection algorithm successfully improved the performance and the speed of the overall deep learning models.