Enhanced EfficientNet-Extended Multimodal Parkinson’s disease classification with Hybrid Particle Swarm and Grey Wolf Optimizer

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra, resulting in both motor impairments and cognitive decline. Traditional PD classification methods are expert-dependent and time-intensive, while existing deep learning (DL) models often suffer from inconsistent accuracy, limited interpretability, and inability to fully capture PD's clinical heterogeneity. This study proposes a novel framework Enhanced EfficientNet-Extended Multimodal PD Classification with Hybrid Particle Swarm and Grey Wolf Optimizer (EEFN-XM-PDC-HybPS-GWO) to overcome these challenges. The model integrates T1-weighted MRI, DaTscan images, and gait scores from NTUA and PhysioNet repository respectively. Denoising is achieved via Multiscale Attention Variational Autoencoders (MSA-VAE), and critical regions are segmented using Semantic Invariant Multi-View Clustering (SIMVC). The Enhanced EfficientNet-Extended Multimodal (EEFN-XM) model extracts and fuses image and gait features, while HybPS-GWO optimizes classification weights. The system classifies subjects into early-stage PD, advanced-stage PD, and healthy controls (HCs). Ablation analysis confirms the hybrid optimizer's contribution to performance gains. The proposed model achieved 99.2% accuracy with stratified 5-fold cross-validation, outperforming DMFEN-PDC, MMT-CA-PDC, and LSTM-PDD-GS by 7.3%, 15.97%, and 10.43%, respectively, and reduced execution time by 33.33%. EEFN-XM-PDC-HybPS-GWO demonstrates superior accuracy, computational efficiency, and clinical relevance, particularly in early-stage diagnosis and PD classification.