Precision lung cancer screening from CT scans using a VGG16-based convolutional neural network

Objective The research aims to develop an advanced and precise lung cancer screening model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN).Methods Based on the health medical big data platform of Shandong University, we developed a VGG16-Based CNN lung cancer screening model. This model was trained using the Computed Tomography scans data of patients from Pingyi Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital in Shandong Province, from January to February 2023. Data augmentation techniques, including random resizing, cropping, horizontal flipping, color jitter, random rotation and normalization, were applied to improve model generalization. We used five-fold cross-validation to robustly assess performance. The model was fine-tuned with an SGD optimizer (learning rate 0.001, momentum 0.9, and L2 regularization) and a learning rate scheduler. Dropout layers were added to prevent the model from relying too heavily on specific neurons, enhancing its ability to generalize. Early stopping was implemented when validation loss did not decrease over 10 epochs. In addition, we evaluated the model's performance with Area Under the Curve (AUC), Classification accuracy, Positive Predictive Value (PPV), and Negative Predictive Value (NPV), Sensitivity, Specificity and F1 score. External validation used an independent dataset from the same hospital, covering January to February 2022.Results The training and validation loss and accuracy over iterations show that both accuracy metrics peak at over 0.9 by iteration 15, prompting early stopping to prevent overfitting. Based on five-fold cross-validation, the ROC curves for the VGG16-Based CNN model, demonstrate an AUC of 0.963 +/- 0.004, highlighting its excellent diagnostic capability. Confusion matrices provide average metrics with a classification accuracy of 0.917 +/- 0.004, PPV of 0.868 +/- 0.015, NPV of 0.931 +/- 0.003, Sensitivity of 0.776 +/- 0.01, Specificity of 0.962 +/- 0.005 and F1 score of 0.819 +/- 0.008, respectively. External validation confirmed the model's robustness across different patient populations and imaging conditions.Conclusion The VGG16-Based CNN lung screening model constructed in this study can effectively identify lung tumors, demonstrating reliability and effectiveness in real-world medical settings, and providing strong theoretical and empirical support for its use in lung cancer screening.