VCNet: Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Detection and Classification of Lung Carcinoma Using Chest Radiographs

Ritu Tandon; Shweta Agrawal; Arthur Chang; Shahab S Band

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2022.894920

VCNet: Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Detection and Classification of Lung Carcinoma Using Chest Radiographs

Front Public Health. 2022 Jun 20:10:894920. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.894920. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Ritu Tandon¹, Shweta Agrawal¹, Arthur Chang², Shahab S Band³

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Advance Computing, SAGE University, Indore, India.
² Bachelor Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliu, Taiwan.
³ Future Technology Research Center, College of Future, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliu, Taiwan.

Abstract

Detection of malignant lung nodules from Computed Tomography (CT) images is a significant task for radiologists. But, it is time-consuming in nature. Despite numerous breakthroughs in studies on the application of deep learning models for the identification of lung cancer, researchers and doctors still face challenges when trying to deploy the model in clinical settings to achieve improved accuracy and sensitivity on huge datasets. In most situations, deep convolutional neural networks are used for detecting the region of the main nodule of the lung exclusive of considering the neighboring tissues of the nodule. Although the accuracy achieved through CNN is good enough but this models performance degrades when there are variations in image characteristics like: rotation, tiling, and other abnormal image orientations. CNN does not store relative spatial relationships among features in scanned images. As CT scans have high spatial resolution and are sensitive to misalignments during the scanning process, there is a requirement of a technique which helps in considering spatial information of image features also. In this paper, a hybrid model named VCNet is proposed by combining the features of VGG-16 and capsule network (CapsNet). VGG-16 model is used for object recognition and classification. CapsNet is used to address the shortcomings of convolutional neural networks for image rotation, tiling, and other abnormal image orientations. The performance of VCNeT is verified on the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) image collection dataset. It achieves higher testing accuracy of 99.49% which is significantly better than MobileNet, Xception, and VGG-16 that has achieved an accuracy of 98, 97.97, and 96.95%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed hybrid VCNet framework can be used for the clinical purpose for nodule detection in lung carcinoma detection.

Keywords: CT; MobileNet; VCNet; VGG-16; Xception; capsule network; convolutional neural networks.

MeSH terms

Carcinoma*
Deep Learning*
Humans
Lung
Lung Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
Tomography, X-Ray Computed