Deep learning based lung cancer detection

Abstract

Lung cancer is one type of cancer that first appears in the lungs. Cancer arises when the body's cells
begin to multiply uncontrollably. In order to discover lung cancer and localize the tumour, a variety
of procedures, including CT scans, MRIs, and chest x-rays, were carried out. To save as many lives
as possible, early cancer identification is now crucial. Because there is so much noise in medical
imaging, it can be difficult to predict what will happen next. The main objective of this study is to
develop an automated system for detecting lung cancer using the transfer learning. a deep learning
method on the VGG16 architecture, while ensuring that no crucial information is lost during image
processing on the data collected from significant, qualified centers with professional training.

Keywords: Lung cancer; CT scans; deep learning; transfer learning; VGG16

1. Introduction
When cells produce too many new cells and the older or aberrant ones don't die when they have
to, then cancer develops. Cancer cells may displace healthy cells due to their uncontrolled
development. Due to this, our body struggles to operate normally. Cancer comes in a variety of
forms. Cancer is called by the area of the body where it first appeared and can appear anywhere
in the body. A tumor is a growth or mass. However, the majority of bumps are not cancerous.
Benign refers to lumps that are not cancerous. Malignant lumps are cancerous growths. Cancer
differs from benign tumors in that it can spread to other regions of the body. Benign tumors
cannot. Cancerous cells are capable of separating from the cancer's primary growth location.
These cells may spread throughout the body and risk ending up in the lymph nodes or in other
organs, which might interfere with their ability to carry out their usual duties [1].

Lung cancer is one form of cancer which begins in lungs is lung cancer. When the body's cells
start to proliferate out of control, cancer develops [2]. Numerous tests, including CT scans,
MRIs, and chest x-rays, were performed to find lung cancer so that doctors could locate the
tumor and treat it appropriately. Today, early cancer detection is essential to saving as many
lives as possible. It's challenging to anticipate what will happen next because of the significant
noise present in medical imaging. As a consequence, medical pictures will be preprocessed using
image processing techniques, and then lung cancer will be detected using machine learning and
deep learning algorithms based on preprocessed image segmentation.

The major goal of this study is to create an automated system for detecting lung cancer using
deep learning technique called transfer learning on VGG16 architecture, while making sure that
no essential information is lost during image processing on the data acquired from significant,
professionally educated authorized centers.

2. Literature survey

Our survey indicates that there are many various types of imagery utilized for medical imaging,
but computer tomography (CT) scans are typically chosen because of the lower noise. The best
technique for feature extraction, object categorization, and medical imaging has been
demonstrated to be deep learning. Related work to categorize lung cancer is shown in table 1.

Table 1: Related work for lung cancer classification

Ref No. Dataset Method Remarks

[16] JSRT DenseNet-121 75 percent accuracy

[17] Lung1 ResNet18 & CNN Accuracy 63 percent

[18] LUNA 16, KDSB DFD-Net Accuracy 87 percent

[19] UCI MLDb Multicase SVM 87 percent prediction

[20] 274 radiographs ANN 73 percent detection

and 323 lung
nodules

[21] CT scans Artificial life Improved Accuracy

method

[22] TCIA Deep Screener Accuracy of 82%

3. Convolutional neural network - A deep learning architecture

Instead than using a set of pre-programmed instructions, deep learning algorithms will
automatically analyze patterns from massive volumes of data [3]. A Convolutional Neural
Network (ConvNet/CNN) [5] is the Deep Learning method which takes in the input picture, gives
various elements and objects in the image priority (learnable weights and biases), and distinguish
between them. Comparatively speaking, the ConvNet requires substantially less pre-processing
than other classification techniques. ConvNets has the capacity to learn these properties and
filters, when it comes to basic techniques filters were hand-engineered.

Structure of the ConvNet is similar to connection pattern of neurons in human brain and was
modelled after how visual cortex is organized. Only in Receptive Field, the constrained area of
visual field, do individual neurons react to inputs. Such fields are grouped together and
encompass the full visual field. A sample CNN architecture is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1. CNN model example (image source: [4])

Convolutional layer, pooling layer, ReLU correction layer, and fully-connected layer are the 4
different types of layers that make up a convolutional neural network.

3. 1 Convolutional layer:

The convolutional layer, that is always first layer, serves as the brain of convolutional neural
networks. Its objective is to discover the presence of a particular set of features in the input
images. To achieve this, convolution filtering is employed. The fundamental concept is to "drag"
the window which represent the feature across the image, calculate the convolution product
between feature and each segment of the scanned image, and then move the window away from
the image.

Multiple images are therefore supplied into the convolutional layer, which then calculates the
convolution for every image with each filter. The features in the images match the filters
precisely. Then receive the feature map to each image and filter combination which shows where
features were located in image. The greater the number, the more the associated location in the
image matches the feature. The network learns features during the training phase rather than
having them defined beforehand. Weights of the convolution layer are referred to as filter kernels.
Gradient descent back propagation is used to initialize them and subsequently update them [6].
3.2 Pooling layer

This sort of layer, which receives many feature maps and executes the pooling operation for each
of them, is frequently sandwiched between two layers of convolution. The pooling procedure
involves reducing size of photos while maintaining their crucial features. The amount of feature
maps we receive as output and input are equal, but they are substantially smaller. Network's
parameters and computations are simplified by pooling layer. This increases the network's
effectiveness and prevents over learning [7].

3.3 ReLu Layer

The ReLU correction layer substitutes 0s for the negative values which are provided as inputs. It
carries out the task of activation [8,9]. The real non-linear function is known as ReLU (Rectified
Linear Units) is defined as follows:

ReLU(x)=max(0,x) (1)

Here,

x : input value
Larger value between 0 and the input value is the ReLu activation function's output value.

3.4 Fully connected layer

The last convolutional or pooling layer's output is sent to fully connected layer, and it is flattened
prior to being used. Last layer, which follows the fully connected layers, employs the softmax
activation function [10] to figure out probability of which input belongs to a certain class
(classification).

4. Methodology

CNN-based image classification has demonstrated reasonably excellent performance. The goal
of this research study is to employ Transfer learning [11], a deep learning approach, to classify
lung cancer images.

4.1 Data Collection

Lung cancer dataset [12] from “Iraq-Oncology Teaching Hospital/National Center for Cancer
Diseases (IQ-OTH/NCCD)”, which have patients CT images with different stage lung cancer
and also healthy volunteers. Oncologists and radiologists at these 2 centers marked
“IQ-OTH/NCCD” slides. 1190 pictures reflect CT scan slices from 110 patients in the collection.
Malignant, benign and normal cases are divided into three categories. There are 40 cases that
have been identified as malignant, 15 that have been identified as benign, and 55 that have been
classed as normal. Four case studies, including malignant and non-malignant pictures. CT scans
are acquired in DICOM format at first. Scanner utilized is a Siemens SOMATOM.
The CT procedure involves the following steps:

 By holding breath at full inspiration, reading is performed at 120 kV, 1 mm slice

thickness, 350–1200 HU window widths, and 50–600 HU window centers.
 The study was given the go-ahead by the institutional review boards of the participating
hospitals.
 Each scan has many slices.
 There are between 80 and 200 slices total, and each one shows an image of a human chest
from different angles.
 Living situation, residency location, educational achievement, age, gender were different
for 110 cases.

Sample images of normal and malignant cases is shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3.

Figure 2: Samples for normal class

Figure 3: Samples for Malignant class

4.2 Transfer Learning

With base dataset, base network was trained, and then features learnt from first stage were reused
for the other network to train on the second dataset and task. The use of pre-trained models on
comparable data has yielded positive results in image classification tasks. Few firms had
produced models that require weeks to train on contemporary technology, such as the famous
CNN’s are Microsoft ResNet Model [15], Google Inception Model [14], and Oxford VGG
Model [13]. Those models may be downloaded, used with newer models that use images as input
to provide more accurate result.
4.3 Oxford VGG Model

At “Image Net Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC)” in 2014, VGG shown in
Figure 4, won 2nd place in the image classification and first place in image localization test. This
model was built by an Oxford team of researchers, who made weights and structure available
online. Structure was created by just 3*3 convolution layers, 2*2 max pool layers, and fully-
connected layers at the last, as shown in Fig. 4. The input picture should be 224*224*3 pixels in
size (RGB image).

Figure 4: VGG16 Architecture (Image source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/vgg-16-cnn-

model/)

4.4 Proposed model

The images in the collection were all resized to 512x512 pixels, and the dataset includes normal
and malignant cases at various phases of development. There were 763 images in train set, 152
images in validation set, and 188 images in test set.

Image will be loaded into the VGG16 layer, which will include pre train weights, and fully
connected dense layer with sigmoid activation as final layer. Suggested system, as illustrated in
Figure 5, is made up of 2 layers: pre-trained VGG16 layer and the dense layer. Weights that have
been pre-trained for VGG16 model will be imported, summary of the model before training is
shown in figure 6.
 Figure 6. Summary of the model

Input data will be learned with pre-trained weights, and single learning layer will be dense layer
with the sigmoid activation function and does a good job with binary classification. For
compilation, to calculate loss, binary_crossentropy and ‘adam’ optimizier were used. And model
is trained till 30 epochs, and batch size as 32.

4.4.1 Sigmoid activation function

Weighted sum of input’s is subjected to activation function, and the outcome is used as an input
for the following layer. It is a given that a neuron's output will always range from 0 to 1 when its
activation function is a sigmoid function, refer equation 2.

1
s(x) = −x (2)
1+ e

Here,
e : Euler’s number
x : Dot product of each neuron value with weights

4.4.2 Binary crossentrophy :

Binary crossentropy is the loss function used in binary classification problems, refer equation 3.
Those were tasks that provide a one, two-option answer to a problem (normal/malignant).

N M
1
Logloss = -
N
∑ ∑ y ij log ⁡(¿ ¿ pij )¿ ¿ (3)
i j

Here,

M represents number of classes

N represents number of rows

 IQ-OTH/
NCCD

Input Dataset
Data Collection
Normal

Malignant

Split data into train, validation and

test

Data pre-processing

Proposed model

VGG16

Dense layer
with sigmoid

Compile
Binary cross
entropy

Adam
optimizer

Training Classification
 Figure 5: Proposed deep-Architecture to classify lung cancer

5. Experimental results

The experiment was carried out in google collab, and used a free GPU to train the model.The
measurements recorded during the training of dataset were loss and accuracy. These
measurements were measured for both training and validation data. VGG16 model has achieved
100 percent training accuracy, where as for validation accuracy, VGG16 achieved 84 percent
accuracy. VGG16 correctly detects lung cancer at early, medium and final stage and also it
detects normal cases. In the next work, needed to improve the validation accuracy by working
with different deep learning models, and select which suits the best deep learning model to detect
lung cancer early. Loss graph and accuracy graph for the proposed model were shown in figure
7. The qualitative results predicted by the proposed system is displayed in table 2.
 Figure 7: Loss and Accuracy graph

Table 2: Qualitative results predicted by the proposed deep learning model

Class Test image Result predicted the system Prediction is correct or

not
Normal Normal Yes

Normal Normal Yes

Malignan Malignant Yes

t
Malignan Malignant Yes
t

6. Conclusion and future work

For early lung cancer detection, proposed an deep architecture based on transfer learning,
modified VGG16 model with dense layer as sigmoid activation function, and achieved 100
percent training accuracy, 83 percent as validation accuracy. VGG16 correctly detects lung
cancer at early, medium and final stage and also it detects normal cases. In the next work, needed
to improve the validation accuracy by working with different deep learning models, and select
which suits the best deep learning model to detect lung cancer early. We will train different deep
learning architectures like VGG19, ResNet50 and Inception V3, and compare the results among
those architecture and identify which suits the best for lung cancer detection.

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