Exploration and Enhancement of Classifiers in the Detection of Lung Cancer from Histopathological Images

Abstract

Lung cancer is a prevalent malignancy that impacts individuals of all genders and is often diagnosed late due to delayed symptoms. To catch it early, researchers are developing algorithms to study lung cancer images. The primary objective of this work is to propose a novel approach for the detection of lung cancer using histopathological images. In this work, the histopathological images underwent preprocessing, followed by segmentation using a modified approach of KFCM-based segmentation and the segmented image intensity values were dimensionally reduced using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO). Algorithms such as KL Divergence and Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) are used for feature selection. Seven different classifiers such as SVM, KNN, Random Forest, Decision Tree, Softmax Discriminant, Multilayer Perceptron, and BLDC were used to analyze and classify the images as benign or malignant. Results were compared using standard metrics, and kappa analysis assessed classifier agreement. The Decision Tree Classifier with GWO feature extraction achieved good accuracy of 85.01% without feature selection and hyperparameter tuning approaches. Furthermore, we present a methodology to enhance the accuracy of the classifiers by employing hyperparameter tuning algorithms based on Adam and RAdam. By combining features from GWO and IWO, and using the RAdam algorithm, the Decision Tree classifier achieves the commendable accuracy of 91.57%.