Deep feature engineering for accurate sperm morphology classification using CBAM-enhanced ResNet50

Şafak Kılıç

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 9, 1-26

Abstract: Background and objective:: Male fertility assessment through sperm morphology analysis remains a critical component of reproductive health evaluation, as abnormal sperm morphology is strongly correlated with reduced fertility rates and poor assisted reproductive technology outcomes. Traditional manual analysis performed by embryologists is time-intensive, subjective, and prone to significant inter-observer variability, with studies reporting up to 40% disagreement between expert evaluators. This research presents a novel deep learning framework combining Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) with ResNet50 architecture and advanced deep feature engineering (DFE) techniques for automated, objective sperm morphology classification. Materials and methods:: We propose a hybrid architecture integrating ResNet50 backbone with CBAM attention mechanisms, enhanced by a comprehensive deep feature engineering pipeline. The framework incorporates multiple feature extraction layers (CBAM, GAP, GMP, pre-final) combined with 10 distinct feature selection methods including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Chi-square test, Random Forest importance, variance thresholding, and their intersections. Classification is performed using Support Vector Machines with RBF/Linear kernels and k-Nearest Neighbors algorithms. The model was rigorously evaluated on two benchmark datasets: SMIDS (3000 images, 3-class) and HuSHeM (216 images, 4-class) using 5-fold cross-validation. Results:: The proposed framework achieved exceptional performance with test accuracies of 96.08 ± 1.2% on SMIDS dataset and 96.77 ± 0.8% on HuSHeM dataset using deep feature engineering, representing significant improvements of 8.08% and 10.41% respectively over baseline CNN performance. McNemar’s test confirmed statistical significance (χ2=24.31,p

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0330914 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 30914&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0330914

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0330914

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().