A Novel Approach Using AI-vision Transformer for CT Scan Analysis for Lung Cancer Detection

Diagnosing lung cancer remains challenging because of the subtle differences between benign versus malignant disease on imaging studies. While traditional, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the mainstay of medical imaging analysis, they still have limited applicability and robustness with variation of imaging methods. The advancement of machine learning is transforming traditional methods of diagnosis in consumer-facing healthcare technologies, changing processes in accessibility and personalized patient care. This paper describes the use of Vision Transformers (ViTs) for the task of lung cancer classification with CT scans, associated with consumer health applications. The Vision Transformer model was trained on complete dataset of 1,190 CT images, and achieved a classification rate of 98.18% with a Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.9676. Additionally, the model's performance was validated on simulated real-time scenarios using real-time noises and blurred datasets. Although preserving validation methods with strong diagnostic accuracy, across the entire dataset the ViT model also outperformed the conventional validated method by showing an accuracy of between 80-88% to differentiate between the noisy images and fuzzy images, even under these circumstances. While initial results provide promising information about the robustness of ViTs when dealing with image variation, a cautious approach should still be exercised in contextualizing results since the evaluation studies were completed within a relatively small dataset and simulation settings. It will be valuable for future research studies to use larger datasets that are more representative of true clinical conditions and datasets that are clinically validated to determine whether ViTs are advantageous to clinical identification of oncology diagnostic and to improve early detection.