Lung Cancer Classification Using Modified U-Net Based Lobe Segmentation and Nodule Detection

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Early detection is crucial for successful treatment and increasing patient survival rates. Artificial intelligence techniques can play a significant role in the early detection of lung cancer. Various methods based on machine learning and deep learning approaches are used to detect lung cancer. This research works aims to develop automated methods to accurately identify and classify lung cancer in CT scans by using computational intelligence techniques. The process typically involves lobe segmentation, extracting candidate nodules, and classifying nodules as either cancer or non-cancer. The proposed lung cancer classification uses modified U-Net based lobe segmentation and nodule detection model consisting of three phases. The first phase segments lobe using CT slice and predicted mask using modified U-Net architecture and the second phase extracts candidate nodule using predicted mask and label employing modified U-Net architecture. Finally, the third phase is based on modified AlexNet, and a support vector machine is applied to classify candidate nodules into cancer and non-cancer. The experimental results of the proposed methodology for lobe segmentation, candidate nodule extraction, and classification of lung cancer have shown promising results on the publicly available LUAN16 dataset. The modified AlexNet-SVM classification model achieves 97.98% of accuracy, 98.84% of sensitivity, 97.47% of specificity, 97.53% of precision, and 97.70% of F1 for the classification of lung cancer.