Hierarchical classification of early microscopic lung nodule based on cascade network

Purpose Early-stage lung cancer is typically characterized clinically by the presence of isolated lung nodules. Thousands of cases are examined each year, and one case usually contains numerous lung CT slices. Detecting and classifying early microscopic lung nodules is demanding due to their diminutive dimensions and restricted characterization capabilities. Therefore, a lung nodule classification model that performs well and is sensitive to microscopic lung nodules is needed to accurately classify lung nodules. Methods This paper uses the Resnet34 network as a basic classification model. A new cascade lung nodule classification method is proposed to classify lung nodules into 6 classes instead of the traditional 2 or 4 classes. It can effectively classify six different nodule types including ground-glass and solid nodules, benign and malignant nodules, and nodules with predominantly ground-glass or solid components. Results In this paper, the traditional multi-classification method and the cascade classification method proposed in this paper were tested using real lung nodule data collected in the clinic. The test results demonstrate that the cascade classification method in this study achieves an accuracy of 80.04 % , outperforming the conventional multi-classification approach. Conclusions Different from the existing methods for categorizing the benign and malignant nature of lung nodules, the approach presented in this paper can classify lung nodules into 6 categories more accurately. At the same time, This paper proposes a rapid, precise, and dependable approach for classifying six distinct categories of lung nodules, which increases the accuracy categorization compared with the traditional multivariate categorization method.