KAC SegNet: A Novel Kernel-Based Active Contour Method for Lung Nodule Segmentation and Classification Using Dense AlexNet Framework

Lung cancer is known to be one of the leading causes of death worldwide. There is a chance of increasing the survival rate of the patients if detected at an early stage. Computed Tomography (CT) scans are prominently used to detect and classify lung cancer nodules/tumors in the thoracic region. There is a need to develop an efficient and reliable computer-aided diagnosis model to detect lung cancer nodules accurately from CT scans. This work proposes a novel kernel-based active-contour (KAC) SegNet deep learning model to perform lung cancer nodule detection from CT scans. The active contour uses a snake method to detect internal and external boundaries of the curves, which is used to extract the Region Of Interest (ROI) from the CT scan. From the extracted ROI, the nodules are further classified into benign and malignant using a Dense AlexNet deep learning model. The key contributions of this work are the fusion of an edge detection method with a deep learning segmentation method which provides enhanced lung nodule segmentation performance, and an ensemble of state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers, which encashes the advantages of both DenseNet and AlexNet to learn better discriminative information from the detected lung nodules. The experimental outcome shows that the proposed segmentation approach achieves a Dice Score Coefficient of 97.8% and an Intersection-over-Union of 92.96%. The classification performance resulted in an accuracy of 95.65%, a False Positive Rate, and False Negative Rate values of 0.0572 and 0.0289. The proposed model is robust compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.