An Improved Lung Cancer Segmentation Based on Nature-Inspired Optimization Approaches

The distinction and precise identification of tumor nodules are crucial for timely lung cancer diagnosis andplanning intervention. This research work addresses the major issues pertaining to the field of medical imageprocessing while focusing on lung cancer Computed Tomography (CT) images. In this context, the paper proposesan improved lung cancer segmentation technique based on the strengths of nature-inspired approaches. Thebetter resolution of CT is exploited to distinguish healthy subjects from those who have lung cancer. In thisprocess, the visual challenges of the K-means are addressed with the integration of four nature-inspired swarmintelligent techniques. The techniques experimented in this paper are K-means with Artificial Bee Colony (ABC),K-means with Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA), K-means with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Kmeanswith Firefly Algorithm (FFA). The testing and evaluation are performed on Early Lung Cancer ActionProgram (ELCAP) database. The simulation analysis is performed using lung cancer images set against metrics:precision, sensitivity, specificity, f-measure, accuracy,Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Jaccard, and Dice.The detailed evaluation shows that the K-means with Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) significantly improved thequality of lung cancer segmentation in comparison to the other optimization approaches utilized for lung cancerimages. The results exhibit that the proposed approach (K-means with CSA) achieves precision, sensitivity, and Fmeasureof 0.942, 0.964, and 0.953, respectively, and an average accuracy of 93%. The experimental results prove thatK-meanswithABC,K-meanswith PSO,K-meanswith FFA, andK-meanswithCSAhave achieved an improvementof 10.8%, 13.38%, 13.93%, and 15.7%, respectively, for accuracy measure in comparison to K-means segmentationfor lung cancer images. Further, it is highlighted that the proposed K-means with CSA have achieved a significantimprovement in accuracy, hence can be utilized by researchers for improved segmentation processes of medicalimage datasets for identifying the targeted region of interest.