Microscopic handcrafted features selection from computed tomography scans for early stage lungs cancer diagnosis using hybrid classifiers

Abstract

Lung's cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Recently cancer mortality rate and incidence increased exponentially. Many patients with lung cancer are diagnosed late, so the survival rate is shallow. Machine learning approaches have been widely used to increase the effectiveness of cancer detection at an early stage. Even while these methods are efficient in detecting specific forms of cancer, there is no known technique that could be used universally and consistently to identify new malignancies. As a result, cancer diagnosis via machine learning algorithms is still fresh area of research. Computed tomography (CT) images are frequently employed for early cancer detection and diagnosis because they contain significant information. In this research, an automated lung cancer detection and classification framework is proposed which consists of preprocessing, three patches local binary pattern feature encoding, local binary pattern, histogram of oriented gradients features are extracted and fused. The fast learning network (FLN) is a novel machine-learning technique that is fast to train and economical in terms of processing resources. However, the FLN's internal power parameters (weight and basis) are randomly initialized, resulting it an unstable algorithm. Therefore, to enhance accuracy, FLN is hybrid with K-nearest neighbors to classify texture and appearance-based features of lung chest CT scans from Kaggle dataset into cancerous and non-cancerous images. The proposed model performance is evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity on the Kaggle benchmark dataset that is found comparable in state of the art using simple machine learning strategies. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Fast learning network and K-nearest neighbor hybrid classifier proposed first time for lung cancer classification using handcrafted features including three patches local binary pattern, local binary pattern, and histogram of oriented gradients. Promising results obtained from novel simple combination.

Keywords: CT scans; K-nearest neighbors; cancer; fast learning network; health care; human and diseases.