An automated deep learning based pancreatic tumor diagnosis and classification model using computed tomography images

PurposeThe advancements of deep learning (DL) models demonstrate significant performance on accurate pancreatic tumor segmentation and classification.Design/methodology/approachThe presented model involves different stages of operations, namely preprocessing, image segmentation, feature extraction and image classification. Primarily, bilateral filtering (BF) technique is applied for image preprocessing to eradicate the noise present in the CT pancreatic image. Besides, noninteractive GrabCut (NIGC) algorithm is applied for the image segmentation process. Subsequently, residual network 152 (ResNet152) model is utilized as a feature extractor to originate a valuable set of feature vectors. At last, the red deer optimization algorithm (RDA) tuned backpropagation neural network (BPNN), called RDA-BPNN model, is employed as a classification model to determine the existence of pancreatic tumor.FindingsThe experimental results are validated in terms of different performance measures and a detailed comparative results analysis ensured the betterment of the RDA-BPNN model with the sensitivity of 98.54%, specificity of 98.46%, accuracy of 98.51% and F-score of 98.23%.Originality/valueThe study also identifies several novel automated deep learning based approaches used by researchers to assess the performance of the RDA-BPNN model on benchmark dataset and analyze the results in terms of several measures.