ELCD-NSC²: a novel early lung cancer detection and non-small cell classification framework

The survival rate of lung cancer relies significantly on how far the disease has spread when it is detected, how it reacts to the treatment, the patient’s overall health, and other factors. Therefore, the earlier the lung cancer diagnosis, the higher the survival rate. For radiologists, recognizing malignant lung nodules from computed tomography (CT) scans is a challenging and time-consuming process. As a result, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been suggested to alleviate these burdens. Deep-learning approaches have demonstrated remarkable results in recent years, surpassing traditional methods in different fields. Researchers are currently experimenting with several deep-learning strategies to increase the effectiveness of CAD systems in lung cancer detection with CT. This work proposes a deep-learning framework for detecting and diagnosing lung cancer. The proposed framework used recent deep-learning techniques in all its layers. The autoencoder technique structure is tuned and used in the preprocessing stage to denoise and reconstruct the medical lung cancer dataset. Besides, it depends on the transfer learning pre-trained models to make multi-classification among different lung cancer cases such as benign, adenocarcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma. The proposed model provides high performance while recognizing and differentiating between two types of datasets, including biopsy and CT scans. The Cancer Imaging Archive and Kaggle datasets are utilized to train and test the proposed model. The empirical results show that the proposed framework performs well according to various performance metrics. According to accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC metrics, it achieves 99.60, 99.61, 99.62, 99.70, and 99.75%, respectively. Also, it depicts 0.0028, 0.0026, and 0.0507 in mean absolute error, mean squared error, and root mean square error metrics. Furthermore, it helps physicians effectively diagnose lung cancer in its early stages and allows specialists to improve the accuracy and consistency of workflow.