Lung Cancer Detection and Prediction of Cancer
Stages Using Image Processing
2021 3rd International Conference on Electrical, Control and Instrumentation Engineering (ICECIE) | 978-1-6654-4966-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICECIE52348.2021.9664658
S.A.D.L.V. Senarathna S.P.Y.A.A. Piyumal
Dept. of Electrical Dept. of Electrical
and Telecommunication and Telecommunication
Engineering, Engineering,
South Eastern University South Eastern University
of Sri Lanka, of Sri Lanka,
Oluvil, Sri Lanka Oluvil, Sri Lanka
lakshithavimuth8@gmail.com spya.anushka@gmail.com
Abstract—Lung cancer is one of the most common and
dangerous cancers in the world. However, lives can be saved
through early diagnosis by CT scan images, which is the best
imaging technique in the medical field for early treatment.
Though CT scan imaging is the best technique, doctors and
radiologists face some difficulties such as not being able to
diagnose early and commence treatment and to interpret and
identify cancer from CT scan images because of the limita-
tion of equipment and specialists. Therefore, to identify the
cancerous cells accurately, computer-aided diagnosis can be
more helpful for doctors. Computer-aided techniques based on
image processing and machine learning have been extensively
researched, and are being implemented currently to address
this issue. This research is mainly focused on evaluating and
analyzing the different computer-aided techniques, find out their
limitations and drawbacks and finally, propose a new model with
improvements. In the methodology section of this research, lung
cancer detection techniques were sorted and listed based on their
detection accuracy. The techniques were analyzed on each step,
and overall limitations and disadvantages were pointed out. It
is found that some techniques have low accuracy and some have
higher accuracy, but not nearer to 100%. Therefore, our project
target is to make a lung cancer detection model using CT scan
images with high accuracy and predicting the lung cancer stage.
Index Terms—Cancer detection, Convolutional Neural Net-
work (CNN), Connected Component Labeling, Digital image
processing, Feature extraction, Hough Transform, Lung cancer,
Lung cancer stage prediction.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Lung cancer, the foremost common cancer in both men and
women, is a major disease burden. According to the World
Health Organization (WHO), amount of new lung cancer
cases is about 2.21 million and 1.8 million deaths, accounting
for about 13% of all cancer diagnoses in 2020 worldwide.
The mortality of lung cancer accounts for about 27% of all
cancer deaths [1].
According to the reports from the National Cancer Registry
of Sri Lanka, the second commonest cancer among males was
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R. Hirshan W.G.C.W. Kumara
Dept. of Electrical Dept. of Computer
and Telecommunication Science and
Engineering, Engineering,
South Eastern University South Eastern University
of Sri Lanka, of Sri Lanka,
Oluvil, Sri Lanka Oluvil, Sri Lanka
rajehirshan@seu.ac.lk chinthakawk@seu.ac.lk
lung cancer (8.6 per 100,000 population) and it had been
the sixth commonest cancer among all Sri Lankans (5.4 per
100,000 population) [2]. The risk of lung cancer in Asian
countries is five times higher among smokers compared to
non-smokers. By early detection, the 5-year survival rate of
patients with lung cancer may be improved by about 50% [3].
Since the early clinical manifestations of lung cancer are not
obvious, early detection of lung cancer will encounter many
difficulties, which results in the best treatment period for lung
cancer being missed. Thus, early lung cancer detection and
early treatment have become important issues. Lung cancer
is usually manifested as pulmonary nodules, and Computed
Tomography (CT) is an important means of examining lung
nodules. For lung CT images, hundreds of DICOM (Digital
Image Communication in Medicine) format images can be
produced at once [4]. Reading the hundreds of images takes
many resources, while lesions often occupy only a tiny part of
an image. There is an enormous workload and misdiagnosis
risk for artificial discrimination. Therefore, it is necessary
to introduce a more objective and intelligent computer-aided
detection technology (CAD) [5].
Currently, radiologists and doctors usually perform visual
scanning of medical images to detect an abnormality in the
human body. Hence, the procedure of diagnosing diseases
manually using medical images is a complex process. The
categorization of disease will be difficult, and errors can
occur by the blurring of anatomical structures surrounding
the lung area, the small size of lesions, and also the different
experiences of the radiologist generate a different interpre-
tation. And also, current models which are based on image
processing have extremely high false-positive rates in which
the result is incorrectly indicated as the presence of a disease
when the disease is not present, which do not allow oncolo-
gists and radiologists to focus on patients with an imminent
cancer threat. Thus, by building a classification model that
reduces the number of false positives and false negatives,
patients can have earlier access to life-saving interventions
and allow doctors to prioritize patient care.
 Cancer prediction is the ability to predict the existence of
cancer by recognizing a particular lesion or lesions in the CT
image with the background evidence of identified risk factors
and the favorable clinical picture of an individual. The stage
of cancer can describe how big it is and whether it has spread.
There are four stages. If nodule size d < 3 cm and it has not
spread to the nearby lymph node means it is a level (I) lung
cancer. If the range of nodule size d is 3 cm < d < 5 cm
and it has not spread to the nearby lymph node means it
is a level (II) lung cancer. If the range of nodule size d is
5 cm < d < 7 cm or any number and it has spread to the
nearby lymph node means it is a level (III) lung cancer. If
nodule radius is any number and it has spread as more than
one tumor outside the chest, such as to distant lymph nodes
and/or to other organs such as the liver, bones, or brain, means
it is a level (lV) lung cancer [6].
The organization of this paper is as follows. A literature
survey was done, which is related to our study, as explained in
Section II. We have discussed the proposed method in Section
III, which includes dataset preprocessing, cancer detection
processes, and Hough transform-based cancer nodule stage
prediction process. Experiment results and discussion of the
model are explained in Section IV. The conclusion is given
in Section V.
II. R ELATED W ORK
In this chapter, a summary of the literature on the analysis
of lung cancer is presented considering the dataset and
methods. The efficiency of the CAD model depends on how
the model performs with real-world problems. Spatial domain
and frequency domain features technique was used to detect
pulmonary tumor volume from positron emission tomography
images and the performance was analyzed by k-Nearest
Neighbor and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to propose
a method to automatically delineate the tumor and detect
its volume, which helps in accurate radiotherapy treatment
planning. Moments, discrete cosine transforms and wavelets
of features were compared with different classifiers [7]. Apart
from that, a Genetic algorithm and conventional template
matching methods were applied along the lung wall to detect
the nodules in chest helical CT images by using nodular
models with Gaussian distribution. The proposed algorithm
is a new template-matching algorithm for the detection of
nodules in chest helical CT images using modular models
with Gaussian distribution as reference images [8]. Decision
Tree, Support Vector Machines, Rule-based classification,
and Naive Bayes were used to extract the features from
the heterogeneous dataset and predict non-small cell lung
cancer [9]. Moreover, Bayesian classification and Hopfield
Neural Network algorithm were used to extract and segment
the sputum cells, which allow determining the classification
parameters [10]. A novel approach for predicting Lung cancer
nodule at an early stage using SVM Classifier has been
obtained with an accuracy of 95.12%, and a comparison of
classification accuracy for ANN, KNN, and SVM Classifiers
was made on lung CT scan images of stage I and stage II [11].
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A feature-wise comparison of the related work is provided in
Table I.
The general trend in radiology classification involves lung
cancer detection and classification for deep learning. Novel
Fuzzy Particle Swarm Optimization Convolution Neural Net-
work (FPSOCNN) deep learning algorithm, which reduces
the computational complexity of CNN was used to detect
the cancerous lung nodules from the given input lung image
and to classify the lung cancer and its severity. Fuzzy Particle
Swarm Optimization (FPSO) algorithm is applied for extract-
ing the features like texture, geometric, volumetric, and in-
tensity [17]. Moreover, to detect lung cancer, a hybrid model
based on the six different machine learning classifiers, three
CNN models, and the mRMR feature selection method was
proposed. Measuring the success of CNNs and the machine
learning classifiers without image augmentation techniques
was experimented using a combination of AlexNet, k-NN and
mRMR method provided the most effective results with an
accuracy of 99.51%, the sensitivity of 99.32%, and specificity
of 99.71% [18].
The publicly available datasets are consisting of DICOM
image format, which is a standard protocol for the man-
agement (produce, store, display, process) and transmission
(share, send, query) of medical images and related data and
are used in many healthcare facilities. As per The Cancer
Imaging Archive (TCIA) (www.cancerimagingarchive.net),
which de-identifies and hosts an archive of medical images
of cancer accessible for public download, there are 32 lung-
related datasets out of 144 all cancer datasets [19]. We
have studied the following randomly selected lung cancer
datasets, which filtered as cancer type: lung cancer, and
status: completed, are discussed in Table II.
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
The proposed method can be divided into three stages
as in the Fig. 1. Initially, the CT images which are in
DICOM image format were converted into JPG file format.
In the image preprocessing stage, median filter and binary
thresholding algorithm were used to segment the lungs from
the CT image. In the cancer detection stage, CNN architecture
[20] was tested with the preprocessed CT scan image dataset.
Finally, Fourier transforms [21], Gabor filter [22], and Otsu's
thresholding algorithms [23] were applied to cancer detected
CT images to extract the nodules from the lung, and Hough
transform [24] was used to calculate the maximum possible
outer diameter of the nodule, which is used to detect the stage
of the lung cancer, while the other researchers implemented
their models to classify the detected cancer as positive or
negative. The details of each step are discussed in the
following sections.
The process of dividing a digital image into multiple
segments is called image segmentation. As an image seg-
menting algorithm, a binary thresholding algorithm was used
to convert input Igray into a binary image Ib . In binary
thresholding, two levels need to be assigned, and according
to the pixel values that are below or above the specified
 TABLE I. S UMMARY OF S IMILAR T ECHNOLOGIES
Title Final result Dataset used Algorithm Accuracy of the models (%)
KNN 92.00
[7] Detecting lung cancer Discovery STE8 CT scanner
SVM 90.00
[8] Detecting lung cancer Their dataset GA 72.00
DT 77.50
[9] Detecting lung cancer CT images from the Moffitt Cancer center
SVM 65.00
BC 64.91
[10] Detecting lung cancer Dataset of 88 scan images
HNN 88.62
KNN 85.87
[11] Detecting and predicting cancer stage I or II Lung Image Dataset Consortium (LIDC) SVM 95.12
ANN 92.68
Note: KNN - k-Nearest Neighbor, SVM - Support Vector Machines, ANN - Artificial Neural Network, GA - Genetic algorithm, DT - Decision Tree,
BC - Bayesian classification, HNN - Hopfield Neural Network.

TABLE II. L UNG C ANCER DATASET D ETAILS

Size
Format No. of
Of the No. of
Title of the partici- Modalities
Dataset images
images pants
(GB)
SPIE-AAPM Lung CT Challenge [12] 12.1 22,489 DICOM 70 CT
A Large-scale CT and PET/CT Dataset for Lung
127.2 251,135 DICOM 355 CT, PET
Cancer Diagnosis [13]
NSCLC-Radiomics-Interobserver [14][16] 3.2 3,886 DICOM 22 CT, RTSTRUCT, SEG
Lung Fused-CT Pathology [15][17] 5.5 11,210 DICOM 6 CT, Histology compartments mapped on CT
Lung CT Segmentation Challenge 2017 [16][18] 4.8 9,593 DICOM 60 CT, RT, RTSTRUCT

As the final step of image preprocessing, segmented image

Iseg was applied to the cancer detection model as described
below.
A. Cancer Detection
The second stage of the proposed system is to correctly
discriminate between normal and lung cancer images, and
CNN architecture which is based on supervised learning was
used to classify the repressed images. The proposed CNN
architecture for cancer detection is described in Table III,
which includes used layers, number of kernels, kernel size,
loss function used, and optimizer.

TABLE III. CNN A RCHITECTURE IN THE P ROPOSED M ETHOD

Loss
Layer No. of kernels Kernel size Optimizer
function
Conv2D 32 3×3
Conv2D 32 3×3
Maxpool2D 2×2 Sparse
Conv2D 64 3×3 Categorical
Conv2D 64 3×3 msprop
Cross-
Maxpool2D 2×2 entropy
Flatten
Dense 512
Fig. 1. Overview of the proposed lung cancer detection system.
Flatten 4

Layer view of the above-mentioned CNN architecture is

threshold levels, the corresponding output pixel is marked as shown in Fig. 2.
white (foreground) or black (background) respectively [25].
Canny edge detection algorithm, which is an inbuilt function B. Stage Prediction
was applied to Ib image and created a binarized mask, which The procedure of the cancer stage prediction on the cancer
was applied to the input image I to segment the lungs from detected image is explained below. It consists of seven steps
the CT image [26]. and four different algorithms.

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 2
x0 + γ 2 y 0 2πx0
g(x, y, λ, θ, ψ, γ, δ) = exp(− 2
)sin(i( + ψ)),
2σ λ
(5)
where, x0 = xcos(θ) + ysin(θ), y 0 = ycos(θ) − xsin(θ), λ:
Wavelength of the sinusoidal component, θ: The orientation
of the normal to the parallel stripes of Gabor function, ψ: The
phase offset of the sinusoidal function, θ: The sigma/standard
deviation of the Gaussian envelope, γ: The spatial aspect ratio
and specifies the ellipticity of the support of Gabor function.
3) Nodule Detection: For the nodule detection, Otsu's
method was applied to the image Igabor which is based on
Fig. 2. Proposed CNN model layers. a binary thresholding algorithm that calculates the threshold
values by minimizing the weighted variance of pixels denoted
by σω2 (t). A binarized nodule detected mask was applied to
1) Noise Removal: For the noise removal purpose, Fast the input gray-scale image Igray , and for the stage prediction
Fourier Transform was applied to cancer detected grayscale Hough transform was applied to the nodule detected image
image Icd , which transforms Icd image between spatial and Ind . The whole computation equation of Otsu's thresholding
frequency domains. A low pass filter was applied to the algorithm can be described as,
Fourier transformed image If f t , which is in the frequency
domain to remove high frequencies in If f t image. Then σω2 (t) = ω1 (t)σ12 (t) + ω2 (t)σ22 (t), (6)
inverse Fast Fourier Transformed image Iif f t was passed
through the Gabor filter for clear edge detection. Fourier where, ω1 (t), ω2 (t) are the probabilities of the two classes
Transform for an image size of N × N , divided by a threshold t, which value is within the range from
0 to 255.
N −1 N −1 4) Stage Prediction: Connected component labeling
ak bl
X X
F [Iif f t (k, l)] = f [If f t ](a, b)e−j2π( N + N ) , (1) (CCL) and Hough transform were used for stage prediction
i=0 j=0 [27]. CCL is used in digital image processing to detect a
connected group of pixels in a grayscale image with similar
Inverse Fourier Transform for an image size of N × N ,
pixel intensity values and labeled with a gray level or a
color (color labeling) according to the component. Hough
N −1 N −1
1 X X ak bl transform is a feature extraction method that is mostly used
f [If f t (a, b)] = F [Iif f t ](k, l)ej2π( N + N ) , (2)
N 2 in medical image applications to detect circles and lines in an
k=0 l=0
image. Simple shapes like a circle can be represented by its
where, f [If f t ](a, b) is the image in the spatial domain and center coordinates and radius or a line can be represented by
the exponential term is the basis function corresponding to its slope and intercept. Hough transform will be responsible
each point F [Iif f t ](k, l) in the Fourier space. for processing the dots on the image and calculating the
2) Edge Detection: In the spatial domain, the Gabor values in Hough space based on its parameters. Ind , which is
filter is a Gaussian filter function modulated by a sinusoidal a nodule detected image was passed through Hough transform
function which is used for edge detection. In the process of to detect and calculate the outer diameter of the nodule.
stage prediction, the Gabor filter is used to extract the edges in
Iif f t . Edge detected image Igabor was passed through Otsu's IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
thresholding algorithm to create a nodule detected mask. The The proposed CAD model is capable of detecting cancer
Gabor filter function as given in the following equation has and nodules in the CT image. The model was developed
been applied to each image. and evaluated by an image dataset called VIA (Cornell
Complex: University Vision and Image Analysis Group) and I-ELCAP
(International Early Lung Cancer Action Program), which
2 is provided by the public library [28]. Expert radiologists
x0 + γ 2 y 0 2πx0
g(x, y, λ, θ, ψ, γ, δ) = exp(− 2
)exp(i( + ψ)), confirmed all of the tumor nodules in this dataset, and the
2σ λ
(3) clinical diagnosis results were also provided.
Real:
A. Dataset
x0 + γ 2 y 0
2
2πx0 The dataset used in the training phase is obtained from
g(x, y, λ, θ, ψ, γ, δ) = exp(− )cos(i( + ψ)), the public library provided by VIA and I-ELCAP, which
2σ 2 λ
(4) currently provides the size of 512 × 512 pixels, DICOM
Imaginary: (.dcm) formatted, 12,645 of whole-lungs CT scan image, and

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 (a) (b)
Fig. 3. Samples of the dataset, (a) normal CT image, and (b) abnormal CT
image with marked cancer nodule.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 4. Filtered images, (a) input image, (b) mean filtered image, (c) median
filtered image, and (d) Gaussian filtered image.
it has low noise impression as compared to X-ray and MRI
images. A sample of the dataset is shown in Fig. 3.
B. Image Preprocessing
The image pre-processing stage starts with image enhance-
ment which improves the interpretability of information in-
cluded in the image or provides better input for the automated
image processing model. To enhance the image features, the
Mean filter, Median filter, and Gaussian filter were tested with
the training dataset as shown in Fig. 4.
A mean filter is a non-linear filter that removes noise while
keeping edges relatively sharp in the input image I. The Mean
filter is a simple sliding-window spatial filter that slides the
kernel all over the image and replaces the center value in the
kernel with the mean of all the pixel values that cover under
the kernel [29]. The Median filter is a non-linear filter that
replaces the pixel values with the median value available in
the 5 × 5 or 3 × 3 pixels around the central pixel value [30].
Gaussian filter is a linear filter that is used to blur the image
or to reduce the noise.
After comparing all the above three filters, the Median filter
removes the noise without blurring the input image, whereas
the mean filter and Gaussian filter remove the noise with the
blurred image as the output.
C. Image Segmentation
For image segmentation, a binary thresholding algorithm
was used and the threshold value 127-pixel intensity was
selected. Using Canny Edge Detection, which is an OpenCV
inbuilt function, the edges of the median filtered image can
be identified. Segmented image results are shown in Fig. 5.
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(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 5. Image segmentation, (a) original image I, (b) binarized mask Ib ,
and (c) segmented image Iseg .
D. Cancer Detection Model
After the image segmentation process, segmented images
were passed through CNN, which is more reliable and
accurate, to train the model for cancer detection. In this study,
SVM and CNN architecture were tested with the dataset. The
variation in accuracy for incrementing number of layers and
different classifiers is shown in Table IV. When comparing to
other models which we have tested with our dataset, the No.
4 model has the highest accuracy. The output of the neural
network intermediate layers of the proposed system is shown
in Fig. 6.
The dataset of the lung images taken for experimentation
is 100, and from that 60 abnormal (with cancer) images and
40 normal (without cancer) images were randomly selected
and validated with the CNN model. The confusion matrix for
the CNN model is shown in Table V.
As mentioned in Table V, out of 60 images, 48 images
of abnormal class are predicted as abnormal, 8 images from
40 normal images are classified as abnormal images, from
60 abnormal images 12 images were classified as normal
images, and 32 images from 40 normal images are classified
as normal. After the cancer detection process, cancer detected
abnormal images are passed through feature extraction meth-
ods, which are Fourier transform and Gabor filter.
E. Noise Removal
Fast Fourier Transform, which is used to decompose an
image into its sine and cosine components was tested with
cancer detected images, and both low pass filter and high pass
filter with Fast Fourier transform were applied for feature
extraction to detect the nodules (Fig. 7).
Low pass filter only allows low frequencies, which means
pixel values that are changing slowly, to pass through the filter
[31]. Similarly, only high frequencies are allowed to pass
through a high pass filter. While the low pass filter removes
the noisy pixels in the image, the High pass filter captures
the edges in an image [32].
When comparing the low passed filtered image and high
passed filtered image, different characteristics were noticed
(Fig. 8). Since low pass filter preserves overall details in the
image, low passed filtered inverse FT image was used to pass
through the Gabor filter to extract the features further.
F. Edge Detection
The Gabor filter was applied to the FFT image, which
is used for edge detection, texture analysis, and feature
 TABLE IV. S UMMARY OF T ESTED C ANCER D ETECTION M ODELS
No. Model layer No. of filters/neurons Kernel size Loss function Optimizer No. of epochs Accuracy (%)
Conv2D 64 3×3
Maxpool2D 2×2
1 Flatten Sparse Categorical Cross-entropy adam 10 33.33
Dense 128
Dense 4
Conv2D 32 2×2
Maxpool2D 2×2
Conv2D 32 2×2
2 Maxpool2D 2×2 Categorical Cross-entropy msprop 7 55.11
Flatten
Dense 256
Dense 128
Dense 4
Conv2D 32 4×4
Maxpool2D 2×2
Conv2D 32 4×4
3 Maxpool2D 2×2 Categorical Cross-entropy adadelta 150 61.33
Flatten
Dense 256
Dense 4
Conv2D 32 3×3
Conv2D 32 3×3
Maxpool2D 2×2
Conv2D 64 3×3
4 Conv2D 64 3×3 Sparse Categorical Cross-entropy msprop 10 79.88
Maxpool2D 2×2
Flatten
Dense 512
Dense 4
Support vector machine (SVM)
Sigmoid 0.09
Polynomial 0.53
5
Linear 0.76
Radial basis function (RBF) 0.74

TABLE V. Confusion Matrix for CNN Classification algorithm generates a threshold based on the histogram of
the input image and separates the image histogram into
Actual
Positive Negative two classes (foreground and background) with a result of
Predicted
Positive 48 8 minimization of the weighted variance of the classes (Fig.
Negative 12 32 10).
The Otsu's threshold mask was applied to the input image
and the lung cancer nodules in the abnormal CT image were
extraction by changing the parameters. The optimal parameter detected (Fig. 11).
values were obtained by changing the other parameters as in
Table VI. H. Stage Prediction
The optimal parameter values are, Lambda (λ) = 30; Theta Finally, CCL and Hough transform were applied to the
(θ) = 15◦ , Gamma (γ) = 0.20; Sigma (σ) = 10, Psi (ψ) = 0 nodule detected image to extract the nodules from the image
in Gabor filter. Gabor filter output is shown in Fig. 9. and calculate the outer diameter of the nodule in pixels (Fig.
12).
TABLE VI. G ABOR F ILTER PARAMETER C HANGING S TEPS
Parameter Min value Max value Step
1 pixel = 0.026458333 cm, (7)
Lambda (λ) 0 100 10
Theta (θ) 0◦ 180◦ 15◦ The equation of converting the pixel value into cm is in (7)
Gamma (γ) 0 1 0.25 was used to calculate the outer circle diameter in centimeters.
Sigma (σ) 0 40 5 The algorithms were tested for 40 non-cancer images and
60 cancer images, and the working process for 10 images is
shown in Table VII.
G. Nodule Detection All above-mentioned processes were executed through
Otsu's thresholding method can be used to convert Gabor Python 3.6 in Intel(R) Core (TM) i3 CPU @1.7GHz with
filtered image into a binary nodule detected image. Otsu's 4.0 GB installed memory (RAM) 64-bit windows operating

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 TABLE VII. F INAL O UTPUT R ESULTS
No. Input Image Input Label Output Image Predicted Label Nodule Size (d) cm Cancer Stage

1 Normal Normal, no cancer detected - -

2 Normal Normal, no cancer detected - -

3 Normal Normal, no cancer detected - -

4 Normal Abnormal, Cancer detected 1.74 I

5 Abnormal Normal, no cancer detected - -

6 Abnormal Abnormal, Cancer detected 0.97 I

7 Abnormal Abnormal, Cancer detected 3.46 II

8 Abnormal Abnormal, Cancer detected 3.76 II

9 Abnormal Abnormal, Cancer detected 5.67 III

10 Abnormal Abnormal, Cancer detected 6.89 III

system and the execution times for the results are shown in
Table VIII.
V. C ONCLUSION
Due to its severity, early detection of lung cancer is neces-
sary for proper treatment to commence. In this paper, we have
proposed a lung cancer detection method using CNN and
lung cancer stage prediction from extracting the features in
the image. To detect the cancer nodules, the CNN algorithm
was applied to the data set, which is publicly available in VIA
and I-ELCAP. The cancer detection scheme performed at an
accuracy of 79.9%. Moreover, a novel methodology for pre-
dicting the lung cancer stages using feature extraction such as
Fast Fourier transformation, Gabor filter, Otsus thresholding
algorithm, CCL methods, and Hough transform was proposed
here. The size of the nodule was calculated by measuring the
maximum possible outer diameter of the nodule. This system
can aid radiologists and doctors in early diagnosis, and this
implementation can be further improved with higher accuracy
in future studies.
R EFERENCES
[1] J. A. Barta, C. A. Powell, and J. P. Wisnivesky, “Global epidemiology
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[2] W. H. Organization et al., “Cancer country profile-sri lanka,” in who.
int, 2014.

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(a) (a) (b)

(b)

(c) (d)

Fig. 8. Low passed and high passed filtered image, (a) Low pass filter, (b)
Low passed filtered inverse FT image Iif f t , (c) High pass filter, and (d)
(c)
High passed filtered inverse FT image.

(d)

(a) (b)

Fig. 9. Gabor filter enhancement technique, (a) Fourier transformed image

If f t , and (b) Gabor filtered image Igabor .

(e)

(a) (b)
(f)

Fig. 6. Intermediate layers of the proposed neural network model, (a) first
convolution layer with 32 filters, (b) second convolution layer with 32 filters,
(c) first max-pooling layer, (d) second convolution layer with 64 filters, (e)
second convolution layer with 32 filters, and (f) second max-pooling layer.

(c) (d)

Fig. 10. Otsu's thresholding algorithm, (a) Fourier transformed image If f t ,

(b) Histogram of FT image, (c) Otsu's threshold mask, and (d) Histogram
of threshold image.

(a) (b)

Fig. 7. Fourier transformation of an image, (a) Input image I, and (b) (a) (b)
Fourier transformed image If f t .
Fig. 11. Nodule detected image, (a) Input image I, and (b) Nodule detected
image Icd .

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 Systems (ICECS 2012). IEEE, 2012, pp. 773–776.
[11] P. Naresh, D. R. Shettar et al., “Early detection of lung cancer using
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