Stacked Gated Recurrent Unit Classifier with CT Images for Liver Cancer Classification Mahmoud Ragab 1,2,3,* and Jaber Alyami 4,5 1 Information Technology Department, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia 2 Centre of Artificial Intelligence for Precision Medicines, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia 3 Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Al-Azhar University, Naser City, 11884, Cairo, Egypt 4 Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, King Abdulaziz, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia 5 Imaging Unit, King Fahd Medical Research Centre, King Abdulaziz, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia *Corresponding Author: Mahmoud Ragab. Email: mragab@kau.edu.sa Received: 06 January 2022; Accepted: 10 March 2022 Abstract: Liver cancer is one of the major diseases with increased mortality in recent years, across the globe. Manual detection of liver cancer is a tedious and laborious task due to which Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) models have been developed to detect the presence of liver cancer accurately and classify its stages. Besides, liver cancer segmentation outcome, using medical images, is employed in the assessment of tumor volume, further treatment plans, and response moni- toring. Hence, there is a need exists to develop automated tools for liver cancer detection in a precise manner. With this motivation, the current study introduces an Intelligent Artificial Intelligence with Equilibrium Optimizer based Liver can- cer Classification (IAIEO-LCC) model. The proposed IAIEO-LCC technique initially performs Median Filtering (MF)-based pre-processing and data augmen- tation process. Besides, Kapur’s entropy-based segmentation technique is used to identify the affected regions in liver. Moreover, VGG-19 based feature extractor and Equilibrium Optimizer (EO)-based hyperparameter tuning processes are also involved to derive the feature vectors. At last, Stacked Gated Recurrent Unit (SGRU) classifier is exploited to detect and classify the liver cancer effectively. In order to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed IAIEO-LCC technique in terms of performance, a wide range of simulations was conducted and the results were inspected under different measures. The comparison study results infer that the proposed IAIEO-LCC technique achieved an improved accuracy of 98.52%. Keywords: Liver cancer; image segmentation; artificial intelligence; deep learning; CT images; parameter tuning 1 Introduction Globally, liver cancer is one of the major causes that leads to high mortality [1]. Liver cancer may either start in liver itself or it may begin somewhere else in the body and reach the liver cell at last in the form of This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Computer Systems Science & Engineering DOI: 10.32604/csse.2023.026877 Article ech T Press Science