Title:

Big Data Analytics and Evaluation

for
Cancer Prognosis and Diagnosis

Abdullahi Kabiru
ID:1201402612

Supervisor: Dr. Kannan Ramakrishnan

Co-supervisor: Dr. Timothy Yap Tzen Vun

Abstract
Research proposal Defense

For

PhD (Information Technology)

Faculty of Computing and Informatics
Multimedia University

June 2023
 ABSTRACT
Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality globally, with a low
survival rate due to inadequate diagnostic systems at advanced stages. Early identification is
imperative for effective treatment. In the past, researchers developed various tools in image
processing to detect lung cancer that were based on feature extraction. However, the
accelerated development of deep learning techniques has been successfully applied extensively
in many real-world applications, including the health sector, such as medical image processing
and disease diagnosis. By combining more modalities, learning can extract better features and
improve identification and predictive ability. The conventional methods of lung cancer
detection and classification typically utilize imaging or clinical data to provide a predictive
probability of benign or malignant nodules. To improve the predictive and classification
accuracy for prognostic decision-making, this study proposed a novel framework called “Deep
multimodal-multilevel class classification (DMM-MCC) for lung cancer diagnosis. The
methods involve combining Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed
Tomography (CT) imaging modalities to enhance the accuracy of lung cancer diagnosis. To
achieve a robust result, pre-processing techniques like image registration, noise reduction,
normalization, and augmentation will be applied to the dataset. Subsequently, the lung nodules
will be segmented to isolate the regions of interest, and feature extraction will be employed
using ResNet as the backbone and Mask-RCNN for instance for segmentation to capture the
distinctive characteristics of the segmented nodules. The extracted features will serve as an
input for a formal classification model that distinguishes between benign and malignant
nodules. Upon identifying the malignant nodule, our approach will further employ multi-level
class classification to determine the severity of the malignancy based on Tumour, Node, and
Metastasis (TNM) stages system, after pre-processing the data along with demographic and
histological characteristics. Performance evaluations and comparisons will be done to assess
the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This study will combine the features from CT and
PET images along with clinical information from 422 Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC)
patients for cancer staging classification analysis. The dataset was obtained from ‘The Cancer
Imaging Archive’ (TCIA).