<p>Artificial intelligence technology has demonstrated remarkable diagnostic efficacy in modern biomedical image analysis. However, the practical application of artificial intelligence is significantly limited by the presence of similar pathologies among different diseases and the diversity of pathologies within the same disease. To address this issue, this paper proposes a reinforced collaborative-competitive representation classification (RCCRC) method. RCCRC enhances the contribution of different classes by introducing dual competitive constraints into the objective function. The first constraint integrates the collaborative space representation akin to holistic data, promoting the representation contribution of similar classes. The second constraint introduces specific class subspace representations to encourage competition among all classes, enhancing the discriminative nature of representation vectors. By unifying these two constraints, RCCRC effectively explores both global and specific data features in the reconstruction space. Extensive experiments on various biomedical image databases are conducted to exhibit the advantage of the proposed method in comparison with several state-of-the-art classification algorithms.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>