A novel Deep Learning architecture for lung cancer detection and diagnosis from Computed Tomography image analysis

Timely identification of lung nodules, which are precursors to lung cancer, and their evaluation can significantly reduce the incidence rate. Computed Tomography (CT) is the primary technique used for lung cancer screening due to its high resolution. Identifying white, spherical shadows as lung nodules in CT images is essential for accurately detecting lung cancer. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based methods have performed better than traditional techniques in various medical image applications. However, challenges still need to be addressed due to insufficient annotated datasets, significant intra-class variations, and substantial inter-class similarities, which hinder their practical use. Manually labeling the position of nodules on CT slices is critical for distinguishing between benign and malignant cases, but it is an unreliable and time-consuming process. Insufficient data and class imbalance are the primary factors that may result in overfitting and below-par performance. The paper presents a novel Deep Learning (DL) framework to detect and classify lung cancer in input CT images. It introduces a 3D-VNet architecture for accurate segmentation of pulmonary nodules and a 3D-ResNet architecture designed for their classification. The segmentation model achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 99.34% on the LUNA16 dataset while reducing false positives to 0.4%. The classification model shows performance metrics with accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.2%, 98.8%, and 99.6%, respectively. The 3D-VNet network outperforms previous segmentation methods by accurately calibrating lung nodules of various sizes and shapes with excellent robustness. The classification model's metrics show that the suggested method outperforms current approaches regarding accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and F1-Score.