Chapter 7 - Machine learning-based detection and classification of lung cancer

Abstract

Cancer is termed to be one of the life-threatening diseases in the world. Among various types of cancer, the highest mortality and morbidity rate recorded is from lung cancer. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are used to identify lung cancer nodules. The development of reliable automated algorithms is important to provide doctors with a second opinion. A lung cancer diagnosis is performed in two steps: lung cancer nodule detection and classification. In nodule detection, from a given computed tomography (CT) scan, the nodules and nonnodules are identified. Once the nodules and nonnodules are identified, the next step is to classify the detected nodules as cancerous and noncancerous. This work explores various machine learning classifiers for lung cancer classification. A majority voting scheme is used to classify nodules. An in-depth analysis of different machine learning algorithms’ performance is presented in this work.