Segmentation and Classification of Lung Cancer Images Using Deep Learning

Lung cancer ranks among the world’s most prevalent and deadly diseases. Early detection is crucial for improving patient survival rates. Computed tomography (CT) is a common method for lung cancer screening and diagnosis. With the advancement of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, deep learning (DL) technologies have been extensively explored to aid in interpreting CT images for lung cancer identification. Therefore, this review aims to comprehensively examine DL techniques developed for lung cancer screening and diagnosis. It explores various datasets that play a crucial role in lung cancer CT image segmentation and classification tasks, analyzing their differences in aspects such as scale. Next, various evaluation metrics for measuring model performance are discussed. The segmentation section details convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) segmentation methods, segmentation approaches using U-shaped network (U-Net) architectures, and the application and improvements of Transformer models in this domain. The classification section covers CNN-based classification methods, classification methods incorporating attention mechanisms, Transformer-based classification methods, and ensemble learning approaches. Finally, the paper summarizes the development of segmentation and classification techniques for lung cancer CT images, identifies current challenges, and outlines future research directions in areas such as dataset annotation, multimodal dataset construction, multi-model fusion, and model interpretability.