Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for 2D and 3D Medical Image Classification

Designing deep learning architectures is a challenging and time-consuming task. To address this problem, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) which automatically searches for a network topology is used. While existing NAS methods mainly focus on image classification tasks, particularly 2D medical images, this study presents an evolutionary NAS approach for 2D and 3D Medical image classification. We defined two different search spaces for 2D and 3D datasets and performed a comparative study of different meta-heuristics used in different NAS studies. Moreover, zero-cost proxies have been used to evaluate the performance of deep neural networks, which helps reduce the searching cost of the overall approach. Furthermore, recognizing the importance of Data Augmentation (DA) in model generalization, we propose a genetic algorithm based automatic DA strategy to find the optimal DA policy. Experiments on MedMNIST benchmark and BreakHIS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing competitive results compared to existing AutoML approaches. The source code of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/Junaid199f/evo_nas_med_2d_3d .