Enhancing IDS for the IoMT based on advanced features selection and deep learning methods to increase the model trustworthiness

Information technology has significantly impacted society. IoT and its specialized variant, IoMT, enable remote patient monitoring and improve healthcare. While it contributes to improving healthcare services, it may pose significant security challenges, especially due to the growing interconnectivity of IoMT devices. Hence, a robust IDS is required to handle these issues and prevent future intrusions in a appropriate time. This study proposes an IDS model for the IoMT that integrates advanced feature selection techniques and deep learning to enhance detection performance. The proposed model employs Information Gain (IG) and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) in parallel to select the top 50% of features, from which intersection and union subsets are created, followed by a deep autoencoder (DAE) to reduce dimensionality without losing important data. Finally, a deep neural network (DNN) classifies traffic as normal or anomalous. The Experimental results demonstrate superior performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. It achieves an accuracy of 99.93% on the WUSTL-EHMS-2020 dataset while reducing training time and attains 99.61% accuracy on the CICIDS2017 dataset. The model performance was validated with an average accuracy of 99.82% ± 0.16% and a statistically significant p-value of 0.0001 on the WUSTL-EHMS-2020 dataset, which refers to stable statistical improvement. This study indicates that the proposed strategy decreases computational complexity and enhances IDS efficiency in resource-constrained IoMT environments.