A focal loss and sequential analytics approach for liver disease classification and detection

Liver disease poses a significant global health challenge requiring accurate and timely diagnosis. This research develops a novel deep learning model, named AFLID-Liver, to improve the classification of liver diseases from medical data. The AFLID-Liver model integrates three key techniques: an Attention Mechanism to focus on the most relevant data features, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to process potential sequential information, and Focal Loss to effectively handle imbalances between different disease classes in the dataset. This combination enhances the model's ability to learn complex patterns and make robust predictions. We evaluated AFLID-Liver using a dataset of various patient records, including biomarkers and demographics. Our proposed model achieved superior performance, with 99.9 % accuracy, 99.9 % precision, and a 99.9 % F-score, significantly outperforming a baseline Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model (99.7 % accuracy, 97.9 % F-score) and existing state-of-the-art approaches. These results demonstrate AFLID-Liver's potential for highly accurate liver disease detection. To validate the generalizability of the proposed model, we performed cross validation using an external dataset which also yielded a good performance depicting the potential of the proposed model. The novelty lies in the synergistic integration of these techniques, offering a robust approach for clinical decision support and improved patient outcomes. Future research will aim to enhance the computational efficiency, paving the way for its adoption in real-time clinical applications.