Analysis of Colorectal and Gastric Cancer Classification: A Mathematical Insight Utilizing Traditional Machine Learning Classifiers

Cancer remains a formidable global health challenge, claiming millions of lives annually. Timely and accurate cancer diagnosis is imperative. While numerous reviews have explored cancer classification using machine learning and deep learning techniques, scant literature focuses on traditional ML methods. In this manuscript, we undertake a comprehensive review of colorectal and gastric cancer detection specifically employing traditional ML classifiers. This review emphasizes the mathematical underpinnings of cancer detection, encompassing preprocessing techniques, feature extraction, machine learning classifiers, and performance assessment metrics. We provide mathematical formulations for these key components. Our analysis is limited to peer-reviewed articles published between 2017 and 2023, exclusively considering medical imaging datasets. Benchmark and publicly available imaging datasets for colorectal and gastric cancers are presented. This review synthesizes findings from 20 articles on colorectal cancer and 16 on gastric cancer, culminating in a total of 36 research articles. A significant focus is placed on mathematical formulations for commonly used preprocessing techniques, features, ML classifiers, and assessment metrics. Crucially, we introduce our optimized methodology for the detection of both colorectal and gastric cancers. Our performance metrics analysis reveals remarkable results: 100% accuracy in both cancer types, but with the lowest sensitivity recorded at 43.1% for gastric cancer.