ABSTRACT
The early detection of pulmonary nodules using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems is very essential in reducing mortality rates of lung cancer. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning approach to improve the classification accuracy of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) images. Our proposed CNN-5CL (convolutional neural network with 5 convolutional layers) approach uses an 11-layer convolutional neural network (with 5 convolutional layers) for automatic feature extraction and classification. The proposed method is evaluated using LIDC/IDRI images. The proposed method is implemented in the Python platform, and the performance is evaluated with metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC). The results show that the proposed method achieves accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the roc curve (AUC) of 98.88%, 99.62%, 93.73%, and 0.928, respectively. The proposed approach outperforms various other methods such as Naïve Bayes, K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system methods, and also other deep learning-based approaches.