A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework with Explainable AI for Lung Cancer Classification with DenseNet169 and SVM

Lung cancer is a very deadly disease worldwide, and its early diagnosis is crucial for increasing patient survival rates. Computed tomography (CT) scans are widely used for lung cancer diagnosis as they can give detailed lung structures. However, manual interpretation is time-consuming and prone to human error. To surmount this challenge, the study proposes a deep learning-based automatic lung cancer classification system to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. The IQOTHNCCD lung cancer dataset is utilized, which is a public CT scan dataset consisting of cases categorized into Normal, Benign, and Malignant and used DenseNet169, which includes Squeezeand-Excitation blocks for attention-based feature extraction, Focal Loss for handling class imbalance, and a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) for multi-scale feature fusion. In addition, an SVM model was developed using MobileNetV2 for feature extraction, improving its classification performance. For model interpretability enhancement, the study integrated Grad-CAM for the visualization of decision-making regions in CT scans and SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) for explanation of feature contributions within the SVM model. Intensive evaluation was performed, and it was found that both DenseNet169 and SVM models achieved 98% accuracy, suggesting their robustness for real-world medical practice. These results open up the potential for deep learning to improve the diagnosis of lung cancer by a higher level of accuracy, transparency, and robustness.