An enhanced AlexNet-Based model for femoral bone tumor classification and diagnosis using magnetic resonance imaging

Objective: Bone tumors, known for their infrequent occurrence and diverse imaging characteristics, require precise differentiation into benign and malignant categories. Existing diagnostic approaches heavily depend on the laborious and variable manual delineation of tumor regions. Deep learning methods, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have emerged as a promising solution to tackle these issues. This paper introduces an enhanced deep-learning model based on AlexNet to classify femoral bone tumors accurately. Methods: This study involved 500 femoral tumor patients from July 2020 to January 2023, with 500 imaging cases (335 benign and 165 malignant). A CNN was employed for automated classification. The model framework encompassed training and testing stages, with 8 layers (5 Conv and 3 FC) and ReLU activation. Essential architectural modifications included Batch Normalization (BN) after the first and second convolutional filters. Comparative experiments with various existing methods were conducted to assess algorithm performance in tumor staging. Evaluation metrics encompassed accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F-measure, ROC curves, and AUC values. Results: The analysis of precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score from the results demonstrates that the method introduced in this paper offers several advantages, including a low feature dimension and robust generalization (with an accuracy of 98.34 %, sensitivity of 97.26 %, specificity of 95.74 %, and an F1 score of 96.37). These findings underscore its exceptional overall detection capabilities. Notably, when comparing various algorithms, they generally exhibit similar classification performance. However, the algorithm presented in this paper stands out with a higher AUC value (AUC=0.848), signifying enhanced sensitivity and more robust specificity. Conclusion: This study presents an optimized AlexNet model for classifying femoral bone tumor images based on convolutional neural networks. This algorithm demonstrates higher accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score than other methods. Furthermore, the AUC value further confirms the outstanding performance of this algorithm in terms of sensitivity and specificity. This research makes a significant contribution to the field of medical image classification, offering an efficient automated classification solution, and holds the potential to advance the application of artificial intelligence in bone tumor classification.