Artificial Intelligence and its future potential in lung cancer screening

Artificial intelligence (AI) simulates intelligent behavior as well as critical thinking comparable to a human being and can be used to analyze and interpret complex medical data. The application of AI in imaging diagnostics reduces the burden of radiologists and increases the sensitivity of lung cancer screening so that the morbidity and mortality associated with lung cancer can be decreased. In this article, we have tried to evaluate the role of artificial intelligence in lung cancer screening, as well as the future potential and efficiency of AI in the classification of nodules. The relevant studies between 2010-2020 were selected from the PubMed database after excluding animal studies and were analyzed for the contribution of AI. Techniques such as deep learning and machine learning allow automatic characterization and classification of nodules with high precision and promise an advanced lung cancer screening method in the future. Even though several combination models with high performance have been proposed, an effectively validated model for routine use still needs to be improvised. Combining the performance of artificial intelligence with a radiologist’s expertise offers a successful outcome with higher accuracy. Thus, we can conclude that higher sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of lung cancer screening and classification of nodules is possible through the integration of artificial intelligence and radiology. The validation of models and further research is to be carried out to determine the feasibility of this integration

Computational methods for the analysis of functional 4D-CT chest images.

Medical imaging is an important emerging technology that has been intensively used in the last few decades for disease diagnosis and monitoring as well as for the assessment of treatment effectiveness. Medical images provide a very large amount of valuable information that is too huge to be exploited by radiologists and physicians. Therefore, the design of computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system, which can be used as an assistive tool for the medical community, is of a great importance. This dissertation deals with the development of a complete CAD system for lung cancer patients, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the USA. In 2014, there were approximately 224,210 new cases of lung cancer and 159,260 related deaths. The process begins with the detection of lung cancer which is detected through the diagnosis of lung nodules (a manifestation of lung cancer). These nodules are approximately spherical regions of primarily high density tissue that are visible in computed tomography (CT) images of the lung. The treatment of these lung cancer nodules is complex, nearly 70% of lung cancer patients require radiation therapy as part of their treatment. Radiation-induced lung injury is a limiting toxicity that may decrease cure rates and increase morbidity and mortality treatment. By finding ways to accurately detect, at early stage, and hence prevent lung injury, it will have significant positive consequences for lung cancer patients. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to develop a clinically usable CAD system that can improve the sensitivity and specificity of early detection of radiation-induced lung injury based on the hypotheses that radiated lung tissues may get affected and suffer decrease of their functionality as a side effect of radiation therapy treatment. These hypotheses have been validated by demonstrating that automatic segmentation of the lung regions and registration of consecutive respiratory phases to estimate their elasticity, ventilation, and texture features to provide discriminatory descriptors that can be used for early detection of radiation-induced lung injury. The proposed methodologies will lead to novel indexes for distinguishing normal/healthy and injured lung tissues in clinical decision-making. To achieve this goal, a CAD system for accurate detection of radiation-induced lung injury that requires three basic components has been developed. These components are the lung fields segmentation, lung registration, and features extraction and tissue classification. This dissertation starts with an exploration of the available medical imaging modalities to present the importance of medical imaging in today’s clinical applications. Secondly, the methodologies, challenges, and limitations of recent CAD systems for lung cancer detection are covered. This is followed by introducing an accurate segmentation methodology of the lung parenchyma with the focus of pathological lungs to extract the volume of interest (VOI) to be analyzed for potential existence of lung injuries stemmed from the radiation therapy. After the segmentation of the VOI, a lung registration framework is introduced to perform a crucial and important step that ensures the co-alignment of the intra-patient scans. This step eliminates the effects of orientation differences, motion, breathing, heart beats, and differences in scanning parameters to be able to accurately extract the functionality features for the lung fields. The developed registration framework also helps in the evaluation and gated control of the radiotherapy through the motion estimation analysis before and after the therapy dose. Finally, the radiation-induced lung injury is introduced, which combines the previous two medical image processing and analysis steps with the features estimation and classification step. This framework estimates and combines both texture and functional features. The texture features are modeled using the novel 7th-order Markov Gibbs random field (MGRF) model that has the ability to accurately models the texture of healthy and injured lung tissues through simultaneously accounting for both vertical and horizontal relative dependencies between voxel-wise signals. While the functionality features calculations are based on the calculated deformation fields, obtained from the 4D-CT lung registration, that maps lung voxels between successive CT scans in the respiratory cycle. These functionality features describe the ventilation, the air flow rate, of the lung tissues using the Jacobian of the deformation field and the tissues’ elasticity using the strain components calculated from the gradient of the deformation field. Finally, these features are combined in the classification model to detect the injured parts of the lung at an early stage and enables an earlier intervention

Classification of Pulmonary Nodules by Using Hybrid Features

Early detection of pulmonary nodules is extremely important for the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. In this study, a new classification approach for pulmonary nodules from CT imagery is presented by using hybrid features. Four different methods are introduced for the proposed system. The overall detection performance is evaluated using various classifiers. The results are compared to similar techniques in the literature by using standard measures. The proposed approach with the hybrid features results in 90.7% classification accuracy (89.6% sensitivity and 87.5% specificity)

Lung nodules: size still matters

The incidence of indeterminate pulmonary nodules has risen constantly over the past few years. Determination of lung nodule malignancy is pivotal, because the early diagnosis of lung cancer could lead to a definitive intervention. According to the current international guidelines, size and growth rate represent the main indicators to determine the nature of a pulmonary nodule. However, there are some limitations in evaluating and characterising nodules when only their dimensions are taken into account. There is no single method for measuring nodules, and intrinsic errors, which can determine variations in nodule measurement and in growth assessment, do exist when performing measurements either manually or with automated or semi-automated methods. When considering subsolid nodules the presence and size of a solid component is the major determinant of malignancy and nodule management, as reported in the latest guidelines. Nevertheless, other nodule morphological characteristics have been associated with an increased risk of malignancy. In addition, the clinical context should not be overlooked in determining the probability of malignancy. Predictive models have been proposed as a potential means to overcome the limitations of a sized-based assessment of the malignancy risk for indeterminate pulmonary nodules

Computer-aided detection of lung nodules: A review

We present an in-depth review and analysis of salient methods for computer-aided detection of lung nodules. We evaluate the current methods for detecting lung nodules using literature searches with selection criteria based on validation dataset types, nodule sizes, numbers of cases, types of nodules, extracted features in traditional feature-based classifiers, sensitivity, and false positives (FP)/scans. Our review shows that current detection systems are often optimized for particular datasets and can detect only one or two types of nodules. We conclude that, in addition to achieving high sensitivity and reduced FP/scans, strategies for detecting lung nodules must detect a variety of nodules with high precision to improve the performances of the radiologists. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first review of the effectiveness of feature extraction using traditional feature-based classifiers. Moreover, we discuss deep-learning methods in detail and conclude that features must be appropriately selected to improve the overall accuracy of the system. We present an analysis of current schemes and highlight constraints and future research areas

A NEW METHOD FOR PREDICTING EARLY-STAGE LUNG NODULES BASED ON PSO-SVM HYBRID ALGORITHM

The aim of this article was to use the Support Vector Machine (SVM) to predict the benign and malignant solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs) in early-stage lung cancer in order to lessen the patient’s pain and save the money. Fifty and one patient records were collected .Each record consisted of four clinical characteristics and nine morphological characteristics. The SVM classifier was built by radial basis kernel function. The penalty factor C and kernel parameter σ were optimized by comparing particle swarm optimization (PSO), grid search algorithm (GSA) and genetic algorithm (GA)and then employed to diagnose the SPNs. By comparison with a Logistic regression (LR) model, the overall results of our calculation demonstrated that the area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve for the model (0.913 ± 0.051, p\u3c0.05) was higher than the LR model. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity in the model were 90.7%, 89.3% and 93.3% respectively. It is represented that the PSO-SVM model can be used in predicting the early-stage lung nodules

An Innovative Method for Lung Cancer Identification Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Biological community and the healthcare sector have greatly benefited from technological advancements in biomedical imaging.  These advantages include early cancer identification and categorization, prognostication of patients' clinical outcomes following cancer surgery, and prognostication of survival for various cancer types. Medical professionals must spend a lot of time and effort gathering, analyzing, and evaluating enormous amounts of wellness data, such as scan results. Although radiologists spend a lot of time carefully reviewing several scans, tiny nodule diagnosis is incredibly prone to inaccuracy. Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans are used to categorize benign (Noncancerous) and malignant (Cancerous) nodules in order to study the issue of lung cancer (LC) diagnosis. Machine learning (ML), Deep learning (DL), and Artificial intelligence (AI) applications aid in the rapid identification of a number of infectious and malignant diseases, including lung cancer, using cutting-edge convolutional neural network (CNN) and Deep CNN architectures, we propose three unique detection models in this study: SEQUENTIAL 1 (Model-1), SEQUENTIAL 2 (Model-2), and transfer learning model Visual Geometry Group, VGG 16 (Model-3). The best accuracy model and methodology that are proposedas an effective and non-invasive diagnostic tool, outperforms other models trained with similar labels using lung CT scans to identify malignant nodules. Using a standard LIDC-IDRI data set that is freely available, the deep learning models are verified. The results of the experiment show a decrease in false positives while an increase in accuracy