Enhancing Medical Image Classification with an Advanced Feature Selection Algorithm: A Novel Approach to Improving the Cuckoo Search Algorithm by Incorporating Caputo Fractional Order

Glaucoma is a chronic eye condition that seriously impairs vision and requires early diagnosis and treatment. Automated detection techniques are essential for obtaining a timely diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel method for feature selection that integrates the cuckoo search algorithm with Caputo fractional order (CFO-CS) to enhance the performance of glaucoma classification. However, when using the infinite series, the Caputo definition has memory length truncation issues. Therefore, we suggest a fixed memory step and an adjustable term count for optimization. We conducted experiments integrating various feature extraction techniques, including histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs), local binary patterns (LBPs), and deep features from MobileNet and VGG19, to create a unified vector. We evaluate the informative features selected from the proposed method using the k-nearest neighbor. Furthermore, we use data augmentation to enhance the diversity and quantity of the training set. The proposed method enhances convergence speed and the attainment of optimal solutions during training. The results demonstrate superior performance on the test set, achieving 92.62% accuracy, 94.70% precision, 93.52% F1-Score, 92.98% specificity, 92.36% sensitivity, and 85.00% Matthew's correlation coefficient. The results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method, rendering it a generalizable and applicable technique in ophthalmology.