A multi-stage fusion deep learning framework merging local patterns with attention-driven contextual dependencies for cancer detection

Cancer is a severe threat to public health. Early diagnosis of disease is critical, but the lack of experts in this field, the personal assessment process, the clinical workload, and the high level of similarity in disease classes make it difficult. In recent years, deep learning-based artificial intelligence models have shown promise, with the potential to increase diagnosis speed and accuracy. These models attract attention with their automatic learning and adaptation capabilities. In this study, the deep learning-based PADBSRNet model and the PADBSRNet-Vision Transformer (ViT) hybrid method are proposed for the detection of brain tumors and skin and lung cancers. PADBSRNet is a comprehensive deep neural network architecture that integrates separable and traditional convolution layers, multiple attention mechanisms, bidirectional recurrent neural networks, and cross-connections/multi-stage feature fusion strategies. This architecture offers significant advantages in terms of effectively extracting local-global, contextual features and accurately modeling long-term dependencies in image classification tasks. The second proposed approach developed a hybrid method that combines the advantages of the PADBSRNet model and the ViT model. Experimental analysis on medical datasets such as the Figshare Brain Tumor Dataset, IQ-OTH/NCCD Dataset, and Skin Cancer: Malignant vs. Benign Dataset has evaluated the proposed models' performances. According to the experimental results, the PADBSRNet model has shown successful performance with 95.24 %, 99.55 %, and 88.61 % accuracy rates, respectively. The experimental findings show that the proposed deep learning model can effectively learn the complex relationships and hidden patterns of cancer disease, thus producing applicable and effective results in cancer diagnosis.