Lung cancer detection using an integration of fuzzy K-means clustering and deep learning techniques for CT lung images

Computer aided detection systems are used for the provision of second opinion during lung cancer diagnosis. For early-stage detection and treatment false positive reduction stage also plays a vital role. The main motive of this research is to propose a method for lung cancer segmentation. In recent years, lung cancer detection and segmentation of tumors is considered one of the most important steps in the surgical planning and medication preparations. It is very difficult for the researchers to detect the tumor area from the CT (computed tomography) images. The proposed system segments lungs and classify the images into normal and abnormal and consists of two phases, The first phase will be made up of various stages like pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection, classification and finally, segmentation of the tumor. Input CT image is sent through the pre-processing phase where noise removal will be taken care of and then texture features are extracted from the pre-processed image, and in the next stage features will be selected by making use of crow search optimization algorithm, later artificial neural network is used for the classification of the normal lung images from abnormal images. Finally, abnormal images will be processed through the fuzzy K-means algorithm for segmenting the tumors separately. In the second phase, SVM classifier is used for the reduction of false positives. The proposed system delivers accuracy of 96%, 100% specificity and sensitivity of 99% and it reduces false positives. Experimental results shows that the system outperforms many other systems in the literature in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. There is a great tradeoff between effectiveness and efficiency and the proposed system also saves computation time. The work shows that the proposed system which is formed by the integration of fuzzy K-means clustering and deep learning technique is simple yet powerful and was effective in reducing false positives and segments tumors and perform classification and delivers better performance when compared to other strategies in the literature, and this system is giving accurate decision when compared to human doctor???s decision.