Pulmonary disease diagnosis using African vulture optimized weighted support vector machine approach

Abstract Pulmonary disease is a kind of disease that affects the lungs and other parts of the respiratory system and is mainly caused by smoking, asbestos, secondhand smoke, and other forms of air pollutants. Several types of pulmonary diseases are emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, asthma, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and so on. Pulmonary diseases are otherwise known as lung disorders and respiratory diseases. Pulmonary diseases are predicted by several methods using x‐ray images and CT scan images. Some of the recent works predict only a specific disease, and optimal prediction is not yet achieved. Hence, we proposed a novel method known as African vulture optimization (AVO) algorithm‐based weighted support vector machine approach (w‐SVM). The proposed method in this article predicts emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, and normal kinds from the NIH chest x‐ray dataset. The X‐images are preprocessed after data acquisition to obtain the desired size and to remove undesirable noise. The preprocessed images are then sent into the SVM for feature extraction, and the AVO is used to improve the SVM so that a kernel function may be obtained. The proposed w‐SVM effectively predicts the emphysema, fibrosis, pneumothorax, and normal classes from the dataset. The experimental analyses are conducted and compared with existing works and concluded that the proposed work outperforms other approaches in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Matthews's correlation coefficient, prediction time, and modeling time.