A Lightweight-CNN Model for Efficient Lung Cancer Detection and Grad-CAM Visualization

The lungs' abnormal cell growth leads to the development of lung cancer. Early cancer identification could make treatment easier, potentially saving millions of lives annually. This study's main goal is to more rapidly and effectively classify various types of lung cancer by employing a lightweight, computationally efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) model to categorize three different types of lung cancer. With an outstanding validation accuracy of 99.48%, the suggested model surpasses the achievements of previous works. The 15,000 CT scan images in our dataset include three different forms of lung cancer. The proposed model performs exceptionally well, as evidenced by its astounding precision, recall, and F1-score, all above 99%, and by its flawless Area Under Curve (AUC) score of 100%. The proposed model has fewer parameters than the existing transfer learning models. Gradient Weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was used to create class activation maps, which were then used to create a heatmap to display the classification zone.