A novel machine learning technique for computer-aided diagnosis

The primary motivation of this paper is twofold: first, to employ a heuristic optimization algorithm to optimize the dendritic neuron model (DNM) and second, to design a tidy visual classifier for computer-aided diagnosis that can be easily implemented on a hardware system. Considering that the backpropagation (BP) algorithm is sensitive to the initial conditions and can easily fall into local minima, we propose an evolutionary dendritic neuron model (EDNM), which is optimized by the gbest-guided artificial bee colony (GABC) algorithm. The experiments are performed on the Liver Disorders Data Set, the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data Set, the Haberman’s Survival Data Set, the Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen Data Set and Hepatitis Data Set, and the effectiveness of our model was rigorously validated in terms of the classification accuracy, the sensitivity, the specificity, the F_measure, Cohen’s Kappa, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), convergence speed and the statistical analysis of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Moreover, after training, the EDNM can simplify its neural structure by removing redundant synapses and superfluous dendrites by the neuronal pruning mechanism. Finally, the simplified structural morphology of the EDNM can be replaced by a logic circuit (LC) without sacrificing accuracy. It is worth emphasizing that once implemented by an LC, the model has a significant advantage over other classifiers in terms of speed when handling big data. Consequently, our proposed model can serve as an efficient medical classifier with excellent performance.