A comprehensive review on nature inspired computing algorithms for the diagnosis of chronic disorders in human beings

Diabetes and cancer are two major life-threatening human chronic disorders that have a high rate of disability and mortality. These diseases have been diagnosed using different deterministic and nature inspired computing algorithms. Here, an effort is made to represent the role of five different insect-based nature inspired computing algorithms [ant colony optimization (ACO), artificial bee colony (ABC), glow-worm swarm optimization (GSO), firefly algorithm (FA) and antlion optimization (ALO)] used for the diagnosis of these two chronic disorders. Initially, the basic statistics of diabetes and cancer patients have been presented. The main intention of this study lies in exploring the usage and performance of ACO, ABC, GSO, FA and ALO in diagnosing different stage and types of diabetes and cancer. It has been revealed that most of the diabetes diagnosis work has been carried out using ACO followed by ABC. As far as cancer is concerned, the three insect-based algorithms, i.e. ACO, ABC and FA, have been also effectively employed for detection of breast, lung, liver, prostate and ovarian cancer. In general, most of the disease diagnostic work has been carried out using ACO, whereas GSO found to be least explored. The rate of predictive accuracy achieved using the hybridization of ACO and neural network is found to be more promising as compared to other individual or hybrid approaches. Likewise, for breast cancer, the amalgamated use of ABC and neural network is more productive. Similarly, the hybrid approach of ACO and neural network is also found useful for early prognosis of lung and gastric cancer. In general, the diagnostic results obtained using hybrid approaches are more promising than their individual use. However, several hybrid combinations are still needed to be explored for the diagnosis of diabetes and different types of cancer, viz. liver, gastric, ovarian, leukaemia as well as a brain tumour. Finally, there is also a scope to use and explore the efficiency of binary and chaotic variants of ACO, ABC, GSO, FA and ALO for the diagnosis of these two critical human disorders.