Exponential long short-term memory with Levy flight optimization for lung nodule classification

Abstract

Lung cancer, which commonly appears as lung nodules is a deadly type of cancer that develops in a lung. Early detection of lung cancer is critical and challenging task due to presence of overlapping structures, which make it challenging to differentiate the benign and malignant regions. This research proposes long short-term memory (LSTM) with exponential linear unit (ELU) method for the classification of different classes of lung nodules. The hyperparameters of the LSTM network are optimized using the developed dynamic Levy flight – Archimedes optimization algorithm (DLF-AOA), which effectively identifies the optimal parameters for classification. The ResNet-18 method is used for the extraction of high-level features to differentiate various classes of lung nodules. Furthermore, Bayesian active contour (BAC) is employed for the segmentation of images as containing cancerous and non-cancerous regions of lung nodules. The LSTM with ELU method achieves 98.56% accuracy, 97.54% sensitivity, 98.22% specificity, 96.93% precision, 96.33% F1-score, and 1.44 error rate in IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer dataset.