DeepNet model empowered cuckoo search algorithm for the effective identification of lung cancer nodules.

Introduction: Globally, lung cancer is a highly harmful type of cancer. An efficient diagnosis system can enable pathologists to recognize the type and nature of lung nodules and the mode of therapy to increase the patient's chance of survival. Hence, implementing an automatic and reliable system to segment lung nodules from a computed tomography (CT) image is useful in the medical industry.

Methods: This study develops a novel fully convolutional deep neural network (hereafter called DeepNet) model for segmenting lung nodules from CT scans. This model includes an encoder/decoder network that achieves pixel-wise image segmentation. The encoder network exploits a Visual Geometry Group (VGG-19) model as a base architecture, while the decoder network exploits 16 upsampling and deconvolution modules. The encoder used in this model has a very flexible structural design that can be modified and trained for any resolution based on the size of input scans. The decoder network upsamples and maps the low-resolution attributes of the encoder. Thus, there is a considerable drop in the number of variables used for the learning process as the network recycles the pooling indices of the encoder for segmentation. The Thresholding method and the cuckoo search algorithm determines the most useful features when categorizing cancer nodules.

Results and discussion: The effectiveness of the intended DeepNet model is cautiously assessed on the real-world database known as The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) dataset and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing its representation with some other modern segmentation models in terms of selected performance measures. The empirical analysis reveals that DeepNet significantly outperforms other prevalent segmentation algorithms with 0.962 ± 0.023% of volume error, 0.968 ± 0.011 of dice similarity coefficient, 0.856 ± 0.011 of Jaccard similarity index, and 0.045 ± 0.005s average processing time.