Title Hierarchical multi-stage attention and dynamic expert routing for explainable gastrointestinal disease diagnosis
Authors Abbas, Muhammad John ; Alshaya, Hend ; Bouchelligua, Wided ; Hassan, Nehal ; Nasir, Inzamam Mashood
DOI 10.3390/diagnostics15212714
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Is Part of Diagnostics.. Basel : MDPI. 2025, vol. 15, iss. 21, art. no. 2714, p. 1-26.. ISSN 2075-4418
Keywords [eng] deep learning ; dynamic routing ; gastrointestinal disease classification ; hierarchical attention mechanisms ; mixture of experts framework
Abstract [eng] Purpose: Gastrointestinal (GI) illness demands precise and efficient diagnostics, yet conventional approaches (e.g., endoscopy and histopathology) are time-consuming and prone to reader variability. This work presents GID-Xpert, a deep learning framework designed to improve feature learning, accuracy, and interpretability for GI disease classification. Methods: GID-Xpert integrates a hierarchical, multi-stage attention-driven mixture of experts with dynamic routing. The architecture couples spatial-channel attention mechanisms with specialized expert blocks; a routing module adaptively selects expert paths to enhance representation quality and reduce redundancy. The model is trained and evaluated on three benchmark datasets-WCEBleedGen, GastroEndoNet, and the King Abdulaziz University Hospital Capsule (KAUHC) dataset. Comparative experiments against state-of-the-art baselines and ablation studies (removing attention, expert blocks, and routing) are conducted to quantify the contribution of each component. Results: GID-Xpert achieves superior performance with 100% accuracy on WCEBleedGen, 99.98% on KAUHC, and 75.32% on GastroEndoNet. Comparative evaluations show consistent improvements over contemporary models, while ablations confirm the additive benefits of spatial-channel attention, expert specialization, and dynamic routing. The design also yields reduced computational cost and improved explanation quality via attention-driven reasoning. Conclusion: By unifying attention, expert specialization, and dynamic routing, GID-Xpert delivers accurate, computationally efficient, and more interpretable GI disease classification. These findings support GID-Xpert as a credible diagnostic aid and a strong foundation for future extensions toward broader GI pathologies and clinical integration.
Published Basel : MDPI
Type Journal article
Language English
Publication date 2025
CC license CC license description