Interpretable Lung Cancer Detection via Channel Attention Driven Hybrid Deep Learning Model
摘要
Lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, highlighting the urgent need for early and accurate diagnostic approaches. This study presents a dual-channel channel attention-based hybrid deep learning framework for lung cancer classification with comparatively high accuracy. Two publicly available datasets, IQ-OTH/NCCD (CT scan) and LC25000 (histopathology), were employed to evaluate the proposed model. The framework combines fine-tuned transfer learning from pretrained VGG-16 and EfficientNetB0 backbones with a channel attention mechanism, a gated recurrent unit (GRU), and a customize classification head. Model performance was evaluated using five-fold cross-validation, and explainable artificial intelligence techniques were employed to explain model interpretability. The proposed framework achieved 99.55% of lung cancer classification accuracy on CT scan images and 99.95% on histopathological images, demonstrating competitive and superior performance compared to recent approaches reported in the literature. These findings highlight the potential of proposed hybrid deep learning framework to advance automated lung cancer diagnosis and provide a technical foundation for potential clinically validated decision-making.