Robust Neural Architecture Search Using Differential Evolution for Medical Images

Recent studies have demonstrated that Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures are sensitive to adversarial attacks with imperceptible permutations. Adversarial attacks on medical images may cause manipulated decisions and decrease the performance of the diagnosis system. The robustness of medical systems is crucial, as it assures an improved healthcare system and assists medical professionals in making decisions. Various studies have been proposed to secure medical systems against adversarial attacks, but they have used handcrafted architectures. This study proposes an evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach for searching robust architectures for medical image classification. The Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is used as a search algorithm. Furthermore, we utilize an attention-based search space consisting of five different attention layers and sixteen convolution and pooling operations. Experiments on multiple MedMNIST datasets show that the proposed approach has achieved better results than deep learning architectures and a robust NAS approach.