Diseases diagnosis based on artificial intelligence and ensemble classification

Background: In recent years, Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) has become an important research area that attracted a lot of researchers. In medical diagnostic systems, several attempts have been made to build and enhance CAD applications to avoid errors that can cause dangerously misleading medical treatments. The most exciting opportunity for promoting the performance of CAD system can be accomplished by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine. This allows the effective automation of traditional manual workflow, which is slow, inaccurate and affected by human errors. Aims: This paper aims to provide a complete Computer Aided Disease Diagnosis (CAD2) strategy based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques that can help clinicians to make better medical decisions. Methods: The proposed CAD2 consists of three main sequential phases, namely; (i) Outlier Rejection Phase (ORP), (ii) Feature Selection Phase (FSP), and (iii) Classification Phase (CP). ORP is implemented to reject outliers using new Outlier Rejection Technique (ORT) that contains two sequential stages called Fast Outlier Rejection (FOR) and Accurate Outlier Rejection (AOR). The most informative features are selected through FSP using Hybrid Selection Technique (HST). HST includes two main stages called Quick Selection Stage (QS2) using fisher score as a filter method and Precise Selection Stage (PS2) using a Hybrid Bio-inspired Optimization (HBO) technique as a wrapper method. Finally, actual diagnose takes place through CP, which relies on Ensemble Classification Technique (ECT). Results: The proposed CAD2 has been tested experimentally against recent disease diagnostic strategies using two different datasets in which the first contains several diseases, while the second includes data for Covid-19 patients only. Experimental results have proven the high efficiency of the proposed CAD2 in terms of accuracy, error, precision, and recall compared with other competitors. Additionally, CAD2 strategy provides the best Wilcoxon signed rank test and Friedman test measurements against other strategies according to both datasets. Conclusion: It is concluded that CAD2 strategy based on ORP, FSP, and CP gave an accurate diagnosis compared to other strategies because it gave the highest accuracy and the lowest error and implementation time.