Lung Nodule Classification Using Deep ConvNets on CT Images

Lung cancer is a hazardous disease which is the unrestricted growth of abnormal cells that can occur in one or both of the lungs. Lung tumors can be of two types such as benign and malignant. The survival rate of lung cancer depends upon early identification of lung nodules which is a crucial process. We propose a new method for Lung nodule classification from Lung CT images by using deep convolutional neural networks [19]. This method eliminates the need of manual feature extraction which is a feed back of previous works. The network is fed with raw lung CT images from publicly available LIDC-IDRI dataset. Here, the lung images are classified into three classes such as: non-nodules, nodules of size <;3 mm and nodules of size >= 3 mm. This classification is achieved with the help of AlexNet which is a pre-trained convolutional neural network with the help of transfer learning methodology. This method successfully classified the lung CT images into three classes and achieved 98% accuracy with comparatively less false positive rates.