Lung nodules detection using semantic segmentation and classification with optimal features

Lung cancer is a deadly disease if not diagnosed in its early stages. However, early detection of lung cancer is a challenging task due to the shape and size of its nodules. Radiologists use automated tools for more precise opinion. Automated detection of the affected lung nodules is complicated because of the shape similarity among healthy and unhealthy tissues. Over the years, several expert systems have been developed that help radiologists to diagnose lung cancer effectively. In this article, we have proposed a framework to precisely detect lungs cancer to classify the benign and malignant nodules. The proposed framework is tested using the subset of the publicly available dataset, i.e., the Lung Image Database Consortium image collection (LIDC-IDRI). We applied filtering and noise removal in the pre-processing phase. Furthermore, the adaptive thresholding technique (OTSU) and the semantic segmentation are used to accurately detect the unhealthy lung nodules. Overall, 13 nodules features have extracted using principal components analysis algorithm. In addition, four optimal features are selected based on the classification performance. In the classification phase, 9 different classifiers are employed for the experimentation. Empirical analysis shows that the proposed system outperformed other techniques and provides 99.23% accuracy using a logit boost classifier.