Enhancing lung cancer disease diagnosis by employing ensemble deep learning approaches

Abstract

Cancer is a disease that results from the unnatural proliferation of aberrant cells that infest the body’s healthy cells and spread throughout the body. Lung cancer is characterized by an imbalance in the cells of the affected organs, namely the lungs. The prediction of lung cancer at an early stage is very important, particularly in countries that are densely populated and have lower incomes. Clinically conventional approaches, such as blood tests and other types of treatments, are used by specialists. The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has begun, and today, it is feasible to construct a computer-aided diagnostic mechanism with the assistance of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. In this particular piece of research, one deep learning algorithm, an artificial neural network (ANN), has been investigated to determine whether or not lung cancer could be detected at an earlier stage. In addition to conventional ANN, ensemble ANN with weighted averaging and soft and hard voting ensemble techniques are also considered. In order to achieve this effectiveness, the state-of-the-art parameters for the proposed method using ANN are assessed and evaluated using the lung cancer dataset. The empirical analysis shows that hard voting-enabled ANN shows the highest accuracy at 97.47%.