HMedCaps: a new hybrid capsule network architecture for complex medical images

Abstract

Recognizing and analyzing medical images is crucial for disease early detection and treatment planning with appropriate treatment options based on the patient’s individual needs and disease history. Deep learning technologies are widely used in the field of healthcare because they can analyze images rapidly and precisely. However, because each object on the image has the potential to hold illness information in medical images, it is critical to analyze the images with minimal information loss. In this context, Capsule Network (CapsNet) architecture is an important approach that aims to reduce information loss by storing the location and properties of objects in images as capsules. However, because CapsNet maintains information on each object in the image, the existence of several objects in complicated images can impair CapsNet’s performance. This work proposes a new model called HMedCaps to improve the performance of CapsNet. In the proposed model, it is aimed to develop a deeper and hybrid structure by using Residual Block and FractalNet module together in the feature extraction layer. While it is aimed to obtain rich feature maps by increasing the number of features extracted by deepening the network, it is aimed to prevent the vanishing gradient problem that may occur in the network with increasing depth with these modules with skip connections. Furthermore, a new squash function is proposed to make distinctive capsules more prominent by customizing capsule activation. The CIFAR10 dataset of complex images, RFMiD dataset of retinal images, and Blood Cell Count Dataset dataset of blood cell images were used to evaluate the study. When the proposed model was compared with the basic CapsNet and studies in the literature, it was observed that the performance in complex images was improved and more accurate classification results were obtained in the field of medical image analysis. The proposed hybrid HMedCaps architecture has the potential to make more accurate diagnoses in the field of medical image analysis.