Integrating neural networks with advanced optimization techniques for accurate kidney disease diagnosis

Abstract Kidney diseases pose a significant global health challenge, requiring precise diagnostic tools to improve patient outcomes. This study addresses this need by investigating three main categories of renal diseases: kidney stones, cysts, and tumors. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 12,446 CT whole abdomen and urogram images, this study developed an advanced AI-driven diagnostic system specifically tailored for kidney disease classification. The innovative approach of this study combines the strengths of traditional convolutional neural network architecture (AlexNet) with modern advancements in ConvNeXt architectures. By integrating AlexNet’s robust feature extraction capabilities with ConvNeXt’s advanced attention mechanisms, the paper achieved an exceptional classification accuracy of 99.85%. A key advancement in this study’s methodology lies in the strategic amalgamation of features from both networks. This paper concatenated hierarchical spatial information and incorporated self-attention mechanisms to enhance classification performance. Furthermore, the study introduced a custom optimization technique inspired by the Adam optimizer, which dynamically adjusts the step size based on gradient norms. This tailored optimizer facilitated faster convergence and more effective weight updates, imporving model performance. The model of this study demonstrated outstanding performance across various metrics, with an average precision of 99.89%, recall of 99.95%, and specificity of 99.83%. These results highlight the efficacy of the hybrid architecture and optimization strategy in accurately diagnosing kidney diseases. Additionally, the methodology of this paper emphasizes interpretability and explainability, which are crucial for the clinical deployment of deep learning models.