Radiomics-driven and explainable machine learning for rapid characterization of Fusarium wilt and Black Sigatoka in banana crops.

INTRODUCTION: Banana production is increasingly threatened by fungal diseases such as Fusarium wilt and Black Sigatoka, posing severe risks to food security and agricultural economies. Recent image-based approaches using deep learning have shown high predictive capacity for plant disease recognition; however, their limited transparency, calibration uncertainty, and sensitivity to domain shifts can restrict their use in decision-support workflows that require auditability. METHODS: This study proposes an interpretable and calibrated Artificial Intelligence framework for multiclass banana disease-pattern characterization based on radiomic feature analysis of RGB leaf images. Radiomic features were extracted from HSV-segmented banana leaf regions, resulting in a dataset of 14,763 samples characterized by 103 quantitative descriptors and labeled as Healthy, Sigatoka, or Fusarium wilt race 1. RESULTS: Among the evaluated radiomics classifiers, the calibrated Random Forest achieved accuracy = 0.85, balanced accuracy = 0.84, macro-F1 = 0.84, and macro ROC-AUC OvR = 0.95 on the held-out test set. Bootstrap analysis yielded 95% confidence intervals of [0.8406, 0.8691] for accuracy and [0.8306, 0.8606] for balanced accuracy. Three deep learning baselines trained on the same partition achieved higher predictive performance: MobileNetV3 with accuracy = 0.96, macro-F1 = 0.95, and macro ROC-AUC OvR = 0.97; EfficientNet with accuracy = 0.96, macro-F1 = 0.97, and macro ROC-AUC OvR = 0.96; and ResNet-18 with accuracy = 0.96, macro-F1 = 0.96, and macro ROC-AUC OvR = 0.96. DISCUSSION: The CNNs produced strong classification performance on the evaluated repositories, and the radiomics approach demonstrated to be a complementary interpretable and explainable calibrated reference model. SHAP, LIME, permutation importance, accumulated local effects, calibration curves, and Brier score decomposition supported feature-level inspection of the final model.