Pylung: A Supporting Tool for Comparative Study of ViT and CNN-Based Models Used for Lung Nodules Classification

Lung cancer is a significant global health concern, and accurate classification of lung nodules plays a crucial role in its early detection and treatment. This paper evaluates and compares the performance of Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for lung nodule classification using the Pylung tool proposed in this work. The study aims to address the lack of research on ViT in lung nodule classification and proposes ViT as an alternative to CNN. The Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) dataset is utilized for training and evaluation. The Pylung tool is employed for dataset preprocessing and comparison of models. Three models, ViT, VGG16, and ResNet50, are analyzed, and their hyperparameters are optimized using Optuna. The results show that ViT achieves the highest accuracy (99.06%) in nodule classification compared to VGG16 (98.71%) and ResNet50 (98.46%). The study contributes by introducing ViT as a model for lung nodule classification, presenting the Pylung tool for model comparison, and suggesting further investigations to improve the accuracy.