Automated classification of lung cancer subtypes cells using microscopic images and ensembled deep learning architectures

In the intricate domain of lung cancer diagnostics, this research presents a groundbreaking for the early detection of lung cancer at the cellular level which remains a critical challenge due to the subtle morphological differences among its subtypes. This study introduces a hybridized deep-learning framework that combines the global feature expertise of ResNet-50 with the spatial-attention capabilities of Attention U-Net to analyse microscopic images of individual lung cells. A comprehensive image-processing pipeline featuring Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), median-filter for denoising, Otsu's adaptive thresholding for feature extraction and targeted grey- midtone lightening to amplify diagnostically irrelevant textures and suppresses artifacts, which boosts the signal-to-noise ratio by 23%. Using a balanced dataset of 4,650 grayscale images (1,500 per subtype) and enriched extensive image augmentations the model learned robust representations across adenocarcinoma, neuroendocrine carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma. On a 25% hold-out test set, it achieved 99.85% overall accuracy, with precision, recall, and F1-scores all exceeding 0.99 (for neuroendocrine carcinoma). Five-fold stratified cross-validation confirmed this performance (mean accuracy 99.69% ± 0.16%), demonstrating exceptional consistency and minimal variance. By detecting cancer at its very inception in single-cell images, this approach paves the way for ultra early diagnostics and personalized treatment planning in clinical practice at the very initially cellular level.