Summary: Among other machine learning techniques, the extreme learning machine has evidently proved its diagnostic accuracy on many cases in medical domain. Its accuracy mainly depends on the optimal parameters that are used in training. The proposed work is based on optimizing the extreme learning machine using the recently proposed meta-heuristic optimization technique named artificial algae algorithm with multi-light source. In this work, two experiments are conducted using four binary classification datasets related to medical domain. The feasible number of hidden neurons is found from the first experiment using relevant performance parameters. In the second experiment, the classifier with feasible number of hidden neurons is further evaluated with the ten-fold cross-validation method based on its computation time and classification accuracy. In both the experiments, the proposed classifier performance compared with that of other four similar hybrid approaches. It is also statistically compared using Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed rank test based on the area under curve and accuracy values respectively. It is found that the proposed classifier produces better results than the other classifiers.