Enhancing Lung Nodule Classification: A Novel CViEBi-CBGWO Approach with Integrated Image Preprocessing

Cancer detection and accurate classification pose significant challenges for medical professionals, as it is described as a lethal illness. Diagnosing the malignant lung nodules in its initial stage significantly enhances the recovery and survival rates. Therefore, a novel model named convolutional vision Elman bidirectional-based crossover boosted grey wolf optimization (CViEBi-CBGWO) has been proposed to enhance classification accuracy. CT images selected for further preprocessing are obtained from the LUNA16 dataset and LIDC-IDRI dataset. The data undergoes preprocessing phases involving normalization, data augmentation, and filtering to improve the generalization ability as well as image quality. The local features within the preprocessed images are extracted by implementing the convolutional neural network (CNN). For extracting the global features within the preprocessed images, the vision transformer (ViT) model consists of five encoder blocks. The attained local and global features are combined to generate the feature map. The Elman bidirectional long short-term memory (EBiLSTM) model is applied to categorize the generated feature map as benign and malignant. The crossover operation is integrated with the grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm, and the combined form of CBGWO fine-tunes the parameters of the CViEBi model, eliminating the problem of local optima. Experimental validation is conducted using various evaluation measures to assess effectiveness. Comparative analysis demonstrates a superior classification accuracy of 98.72% in the proposed method compared to existing methods.