Image processing plays a vital role in many areas such as healthcare, military, scientific and business due to its wide variety of advantages and applications. Detection of computed tomography (CT) liver disease is one of the difficult tasks in the medical field. Hand crafted features and classifications are the two types of methods used in the previous approaches, to classify liver disease. But these classification results are not optimal. In this article, we propose a novel method utilizing deep belief network (DBN) with grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) for liver disease classification. Initially, the image quality is enhanced by preprocessing techniques and then features like texture, color and shape are extracted. The extracted features are reduced by utilizing the dimensionality reduction method like principal component analysis (PCA). Here, the DBN parameters are optimized using GOA for recognizing liver disease. The experiments are performed on the real time and open source CT image datasets which embraces normal, cyst, hepatoma, and cavernous hemangiomas, fatty liver, metastasis, cirrhosis, and tumor samples. The proposed method yields 98% accuracy, 95.82% sensitivity, 97.52% specificity, 98.53% precision, and 96.8% F-1 score in simulation process when compared with other existing techniques. K E Y W O R D S deep belief network (DBN), grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA), liver disease classification, principal component analysis (PCA)