Synergizing vision transformer with ensemble of deep learning model for accurate kidney stone detection using CT imaging

Abstract

The disease of Kidney stones is a risky disease for individuals all over the world. Many people with kidney stones in the early phase do not detect it as an illness, and it harms the organ gradually. Precise analysis of kidney illness is vital, as it is a major health concern that needs accurate detection for appropriate and effective treatment. CT scans are one of the most extensively accessible imaging models, and they are employed for effective diagnosis. Deep learning (DL) techniques are gradually identified as beneficial tools for analyzing illness in the medical field. However, present techniques employing deep networks often meet low accuracy and overfitting challenges, demanding further alteration for optimum performance. This study presents a Leveraging Flying Foxes Optimization with an Ensemble of Deep Learning for Accurate Kidney Stone Detection (LFFOEDL-AKSD) technique in CT scans. The presented LFFOEDL-AKSD technique mainly focuses on detecting kidney stones using CI imaging. At first, the presented LFFOEDL-AKSD technique applies the pre-processing phase, which involves image resizing for uniform CT scan dimensions and data augmentation through transformations like rotation and flipping to reduce overfitting, sobel filtering (SF) sharpens edges, and the data is separated into training, validation, and testing sets for model development. The presented LFFOEDL-AKSD technique employs the swin transformer (ST) model for the feature extraction method. Furthermore, the majority voting ensemble of three DL approaches, such as the graph convolutional network (GCN), temporal convolutional network (TCN), and three-dimensional convolutional autoencoder (3D-CAE) approaches, are employed to increase the precision and reliability of the kidney stone recognition. Finally, the presented LFFOEDL-AKSD technique implements the flying foxes optimization (FFO) approach for the hyperparameter tuning involved in the ensemble learning models. An extensive experiment is conducted to validate the performance of the LFFOEDL-AKSD methodology under a kidney stone imaging dataset. The experimental validation of the LFFOEDL-AKSD methodology portrayed a superior accuracy value of 98.97 % over existing models.