Recognition of Lung Nodules in Computerized Tomography Lung Images using a Hybrid Method with Class Imbalance Reduction

Lung cancer is among the deadly diseases affecting millions globally every year. Physicians' and radiologists' manual detection of lung nodules has low efficiency due to the variety of shapes and nodule locations. The paper aims to recognize the lung nodules in computerized tomography (CT) lung images utilizing a hybrid method to reduce the problem space at every step. First, the suggested method uses the fast and robust fuzzy c-means clustering method (FRFCM) algorithm to segment CT images and extract two lungs, followed by a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the sick lung for use in the next step. Then, the adaptive thresholding method detects the suspected regions of interest (ROIs) among all available objects in the sick lung. Next, some statistical features are selected from every ROI, and then a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is considered a feature extractor that extracts rich features among the selected features. After that, an artificial neural network (ANN) is employed to classify ROIs and determine whether the ROI includes nodules or non-nodules. Finally, cancerous ROIs are localized by the Otsu thresholding algorithm. Naturally, sick ROIs are more than healthy ones, leading to a class imbalance that substantially decreases ANN ability. To solve this problem, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based algorithm is used, in which the states are sampled. The agent receives a larger reward/penalty for correct/incorrect classification of the examples related to the minority class. The proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on the lung image database consortium image collection (LIDC-IDRI) dataset and standard performance metrics. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms its rivals.

@article{Wang2023,
  title     = {Recognition of Lung Nodules in Computerized Tomography Lung Images using a Hybrid Method with Class Imbalance Reduction},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {14},
  number    = {5},
  year      = {2023},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Yingqiang Wang and Honggang Wang and Erqiang Dong},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2023.0140546},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2023.0140546}
}