Three Stream Network Model for Lung Cancer Classification in the CT Images

Abstract Lung cancer is considered to be one of the deadly diseases that threaten the survival of human beings. It is a challenging task to identify lung cancer in its early stage from the medical images because of the ambiguity in the lung regions. This paper proposes a new architecture to detect lung cancer obtained from the CT images. The proposed architecture has a three-stream network to extract the manual and automated features from the images. Among these three streams, automated feature extraction as well as the classification is done using residual deep neural network and custom deep neural network. Whereas the manual features are the handcrafted features obtained using high and low-frequency sub-bands in the frequency domain that are classified using a Support Vector Machine Classifier. This makes the architecture robust enough to capture all the important features required to classify lung cancer from the input image. Hence, there is no chance of missing feature information. Finally, all the obtained prediction scores are combined by weighted based fusion. The experimental results show 98.2% classification accuracy which is relatively higher in comparison to other existing methods.