Evolutionary U-Net for lung cancer segmentation on medical images

Abstract

Patients with lung cancer can only be diagnosed and treated surgically. Early detection of lung cancer through medical imaging could save numerous lives. Adding advanced techniques to conventional tests that offer high accuracy in diagnosing lung cancer is essential. U-Net has excelled in diversified tasks involving the segmentation of medical image datasets. A significant challenge remains in determining the ideal combination of hyper parameters for designing an optimized U-Net for detailed image segmentation. In our work, we suggested a technique for automatically generating evolutionary U-Nets to detect and segregate lung cancer anomalies. We used three distinct datasets, namely the LIDC-IRDC Dataset, Luna 16 Dataset, and Kaggle Dataset, for training the proposed work on lung images. Our results, examined with six distinct evaluation criteria used for medical image segmentation, consistently demonstrated the highest performance. More specifically, the GA-UNet outperforms conventional approaches in terms of an impressive accuracy rate of 97.5% and a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 92.3%.