Performance analysis of texture characterization techniques for lung nodule classification

Lung cancer ranks very high on a global index for cancer-related casualties. With early detection of lung cancer, the rate of survival increases to 80-90%. The standard method for diagnosing lung cancer from Computed Tomography (CT) scans is by manual annotation and detection of the cancerous regions, which is a tedious task for radiologists. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for multi-class classification of the lung nodules into solid, semisolid, and Ground Glass Object texture classes. We employ feature extraction techniques, such as gray-level co-occurrence matrix, Gabor filters, and local binary pattern, and validate the performance on the LNDb dataset. The best performing classifier displays an accuracy of 94% and an F1-score of 0.92. The proposed approach was compared with related work using the same dataset. The results are promising, and the proposed method can be used to diagnose lung cancer accurately.