Background: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths around the world, making early detection vital to treatment and survival. However, lung cancer has variable clinical presentations, so diagnosis, even by trained medical professionals, is challenging and time- consuming. Deep Learning (DL) has proven effective in training big data to generate accurate diagnoses through classification in a timely manner. Aim and Objective: This study uses data augmentation and hyperparameter optimization methods on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to understand the benefits of various architectures in addition to creating an accurate transfer-based tool for lung cancer diagnosis on CT scans. Materials and Methods: We found a dataset composed of chest CT images of patients with non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC) categorized into adenocarcinoma, large cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma and a control group of normal chest CT scans. We tested the CNN architectures VGG16, InceptionV3, ResNet50, and EfficientNetB0 for feature extraction and observed each model on a variety of different metrics such as validation accuracy, statistical errors, and learning rate. Each model was trained on the prechosen data set 2 times at 6 and 12 epochs and several evaluation metrics were recorded. Observation and Results: EfficientNetB0, ResNet50, VGG16, InceptionV3 achieved test accuracies of 98.92%, 91.40%, 77.42%, 70.97% respectively when implemented with hyperparameter tuning and dropout layers. EfficientNetB0 also exceeded the other architectures in metrics such as precision, recall, and F1-score. Conclusion: Convolutional neural networks using EfficientNetB0 yielded a higher accuracy in diagnosis of non-small cell cancer on CT scan which encourages further research in developing robust diagnostic tools using DL to expedite diagnosis, especially in locations with inadequate healthcare resources.
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