Automated lung nodule detection and classification based on multiple classifiers voting

Abstract

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death globally. Currently, lung nodule detection and classification are performed by radiologist-assisted computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, emerged artificially intelligent techniques such as neural network, support vector machine, and HMM have improved the detection and classification process of cancer in any part of the human body. Such automated methods and their possible combinations could be used to assist radiologists at early detection of lung nodules that could reduce treatment cost, death rate. Literature reveals that classification based on voting of classifiers exhibited better performance in the detection and classification process. Accordingly, this article presents an automated approach for lung nodule detection and classification that consists of multiple steps including lesion enhancement, segmentation, and features extraction from each candidate's lesion. Moreover, multiple classifiers logistic regression, multilayer perceptron, and voted perceptron are tested for the lung nodule classification using k-fold cross-validation process. The proposed approach is evaluated on the publically available Lung Image Database Consortium benchmark data set. Based on the performance evaluation, it is observed that the proposed method performed better in the stateof the art and achieved an overall accuracy rate of 100%.