Integrating metaheuristics and artificial intelligence for healthcare: basics, challenging and future directions

Accurate and rapid disease detection is necessary to manage health problems early. Rapid increases in data amount and dimensionality caused challenges in many disciplines, with the primary issues being high computing costs, memory costs, and low accuracy performance. These issues will arise since Machine Learning (ML) classifiers are mostly used in these fields. However, noisy and irrelevant features have an impact on ML accuracy. Therefore, to choose the best subset of features and decrease the dimensionality of the data, Metaheuristics (MHs) optimization algorithms are applied to Feature Selection (FS) using various modalities of medical imaging or disease datasets with different dimensions. The review starts by giving a general overview of the many approaches to AI algorithms, followed by a general overview of the various MH algorithms for healthcare applications, an analysis of MHs boosted AI for healthcare applications, and using a wide range of research databases as a data source for access to numerous field publications. The final section of this review discusses the problems and challenges facing healthcare application development.