Scalable Residual Feature Aggregation Framework with Hybrid Metaheuristic Optimization for Robust Early Pancreatic Neoplasm Detection in Multimodal CT Imaging

Abstract: The early detection of pancreatic neoplasm is a major clinical dilemma, and it is predominantly so because tumors are likely to occur with minimal contrast margins and a large spread anatomy-wide variation amongst patients on a CT scan. These complexities require to be addressed with an effective and scalable system that can assist in enhancing the salience of the subtle visual cues and provide a high level of the generalization on the multimodal imaging data. A Scalable Residual Feature Aggregation (SRFA) framework is proposed to be used to meet these conditions in this study. The framework integrates a pipeline of preprocessing followed by the segmentation using the MAGRes-UNet that is effective in making the pancreatic structures and isolating regions of interest more visible. DenseNet-121 performed with residual feature storage is used to extract features to allow deep hierarchical features to be aggregated without properties loss. To go further, hybrid HHO-BA metaheuristic feature selection strategy is used, which guarantees the best feature subset refinement. To be classified, the system is trained based on a new hybrid model that integrates the ability to pay attention on the world, which is the Vision Transformer (ViT) with the high representational efficiency of EfficientNet-B3. A dual optimization mechanism incorporating SSA and GWO is used to fine-tune hyperparameters to enhance greater robustness and less overfitting. Experimental results support the significant improvement in performance, with the suggested model reaching 96.23% accuracy, 95.58% F1-score and 94.83% specificity, the model is significantly better than the traditional CNNs and contemporary transformer-based models. Such results highlight the possibility of the SRFA framework as a useful instrument in the early detection of pancreatic tumors.