Computer-Aided Classification of Cell Lung Cancer Via PET/CT Images Using Convolutional Neural Network

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Therefore, early diagnosis remains essential to allow access to appropriate curative treatment strategies. This paper presents a novel approach to assess the ability of Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) images for the classification of lung cancer in association with artificial intelligence techniques. We have built, in this work, a multi output Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a tool to assist the staging of patients with lung cancer. The TNM staging system as well as histologic subtypes classification were adopted as a reference. The VGG 16 network is applied to the PET/CT images to extract the most relevant features from images. The obtained features are then transmitted to a three-branch classifier to specify Nodal (N), Tumor (T) and histologic subtypes classification. Experimental results demonstrated that our CNN model achieves good results in TN staging and histology classification. The proposed architecture classified the tumor size with a high accuracy of 0.94 and the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.97 when tested on the Lung-PET-CT-Dx dataset. It also has yielded high performance for N staging with an accuracy of 0.98. Besides, our approach has achieved better accuracy than state-of-the-art methods in histologic classification.

Automated summary

This paper presents a novel approach to assess the ability of PET/CT images for the classification of lung cancer using artificial intelligence techniques. A multi output CNN is built to assist in the staging of patients with lung cancer, using the TNM staging system and histologic subtypes classification as reference. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves good performance in TN staging and histology classification.