Attention-guided CenterNet deep learning approach for lung cancer detection

Lung cancer remains a significant health concern worldwide, prompting ongoing research efforts to enhance early detection and diagnosis. Prior studies have identified key challenges in existing approaches, including limitations in feature extraction, interpretability, and computational efficiency. In response, this study introduces a novel deep learning (DL) framework, termed the Improved CenterNet approach, tailored specifically for lung cancer detection. The primary importance of this work lies in its innovative integration of ResNet-34 with an attention mechanism within the CenterNet architecture, addressing critical limitations identified in previous studies. By augmenting the base network with an attention mechanism, our framework offers improved feature extraction capabilities, enabling the model to learn relevant patterns associated with lung cancer amidst complex backgrounds and varying environmental conditions. This enhancement facilitates more accurate and interpretable predictions while reducing computational complexity and inference times. Through extensive experimental evaluations conducted on standard datasets, our proposed approach demonstrates promising results, highlighting its potential to advance the field of lung cancer detection and diagnosis. Specifically, we have acquired the precision, recall, and F1-Score of 99.89 %, 99.82 %, and 99.85 % on the LUNA-16 dataset, and 98.33 %, 98.02 %, and 98.17 % for the Kaggle data sample, respectively which is showing the efficacy of our approach. One limitation of the work is that it cannot effectively locate the samples with intense light variations. Therefore, future research work is focused on overcoming this challenge.