Novel vision transformer and data augmentation technique for efficient detection of monkeypox disease

Recent technological advancements have paved the way for the optimization of medical processes, particularly automated disease detection. Moreover, the adoption of machine learning (ML) has greatly helped in automating disease detection. Such approaches can detect various diseases early, enabling timely treatment to save countless lives. Early and accurate diagnosis is very important for diseases like monkeypox, to curb its spread. Monkeypox is a viral disease caused by double-stranded DNA and can be transmitted through close contact with infected humans or animals. It’s early identification and accurate lesion diagnosis are critical to contain the disease. This study proposes an automated approach to optimize the diagnosis of monkeypox disease using a novel vision transformer, which is utilized due to its effectiveness for feature extraction. The Proposed approach’s efficiency and accuracy are tested on a public benchmark dataset comprising a variety of skin lesions of different ages and genders. In addition, data augmentation involves rotation, scaling, and flipping thereby enhancing the density of the training data set for better generalization of ML models. Experiments involve binary, as well as, multi-class classification. For the binary class, the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 97.63%, outperforming traditional ML and deep learning (DL) techniques. In the case of multi-class classification with monkeypox, measles, normal, HFMD, cowpox, and chickenpox classes, the proposed model archives an accuracy of 90.61% while precision, recall, and F1 scores are 91.39%, 89.17%, and 90.28%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed approach shows average accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores of 97.54%, 96.19%, 95.16%, and 95.67%, respectively for five-fold cross-validation. Experiments demonstrate that the combination of data augmentation techniques and the vision transformer model significantly optimizes diagnostic performance. In brief, advanced DL architectures with image data-augmentation strategies can help achieve optimal processes for diagnosing diseases like monkeypox, and avoid widespread outbreaks.