Advancing Crayfish Disease Detection: A Comparative Study of Deep Learning and Canonical Machine Learning Techniques

This study evaluates the effectiveness of deep learning and canonical machine learning models for detecting diseases in crayfish from an imbalanced dataset. In this study, measurements such as weight, size, and gender of healthy and diseased crayfish individuals were taken, and at least five photographs of each individual were used. Deep learning models outperformed canonical models, but combining both approaches proved the most effective. Utilizing the ResNet50 model for automatic feature extraction and subsequent training of the RF algorithm with these extracted features led to a hybrid model, RF-ResNet50, which achieved the highest performance in diseased sample detection. This result underscores the value of integrating canonical machine learning algorithms with deep learning models. Additionally, the ConvNeXt-T model, optimized with AdamW, performed better than those using SGD, although its disease detection sensitivity was 1.3% lower than the hybrid model. McNemar’s test confirmed the statistical significance of the performance differences between the hybrid and the ConvNeXt-T model with AdamW. The ResNet50 model’s performance was improved by 3.2% when combined with the RF algorithm, demonstrating the potential of hybrid approaches in enhancing disease detection accuracy. Overall, this study highlights the advantages of leveraging both deep learning and canonical machine learning techniques for early and accurate detection of diseases in crayfish populations, which is crucial for maintaining ecosystem balance and preventing population declines.