{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,10]],"date-time":"2026-08-10T09:31:12Z","timestamp":1786354272129,"version":"build-2736575974"},"reference-count":51,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,9]],"date-time":"2026-08-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1786233600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["J. Imaging"],"abstract":"<jats:p>In recent years, there has been increased attention on classifying histopathological images through hybrid decision-level fusion, and the challenge of exploring data fusion to improve classification accuracy in colon cancer has become significant. This study introduces new elements by incorporating various deep learning (DL) architectures, including EfficientNetB0, DenseNet121, ResNet101V2, NASNetMobile, MobileNetV2, and VGG16 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), as well as Random Forest (RF) and Histogram Gradient Boosting (HGB) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, along with the original dataset. The proposed hybrid decision-level fusion approach analyzes the LC25000 dataset\u2019s colon histopathological images and handcraft features (HFs) to improve predictive performance. The HFs such as entropy, the Gini index, and the radius of gyration from adenocarcinoma and benign colon tissue (CC) were extracted. The prediction of the proposed models leveraging late fusion was conducted by classifying both deep and HFs. During the experiments, it was demonstrated that the combination of ResNet101V2 with RF classifier and all HFs yielded greater accuracy and consistent performance. The achieved performance metrics include accuracy of 94.1%, F1-score of 94%, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 88.3%, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.979. To explain and interpret the decisions made by the DL models, the explainable methods SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) were utilized.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/jimaging12080368","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,10]],"date-time":"2026-08-10T08:08:53Z","timestamp":1786349333000},"page":"368","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Hybrid Decision-Level Fusion of CNN-Based Deep and Handcrafted Features for Colon Cancer Classification"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"12","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5934-329X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Simona","family":"Moldovanu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Faculty of Automation, Computers, Electrical Engineering and Electronics, \u201cDunarea de Jos\u201d University of Galati, 800146 Galati, Romania"},{"name":"The Modelling & Simulation Laboratory, \u201cDunarea de Jos\u201d University of Galati, 47 Domneasca Str., 800008 Galati, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0935-4713","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Adina","family":"Cocu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Faculty of Automation, Computers, Electrical Engineering and Electronics, \u201cDunarea de Jos\u201d University of Galati, 800146 Galati, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-4615-5724","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Diana","family":"Stefanescu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Faculty of Automation, Computers, Electrical Engineering and Electronics, \u201cDunarea de Jos\u201d University of Galati, 800146 Galati, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1849-3072","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"C\u0103t\u0103lin","family":"Anghel","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Faculty of Automation, Computers, Electrical Engineering and Electronics, \u201cDunarea de Jos\u201d University of Galati, 800146 Galati, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"De Matos, J., Ataky, S., Britto, A.D.S., de Oliveira, L.S., and Koerich, A.L. 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