Artificial Intelligence in Lung Cancer Screening: The Future Is Now

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Lung cancer is a widespread malignant tumour with a high mortality and morbidity rate and is frequently diagnosed in the middle and late stages when few therapies are available. Lung cancer screening allows an early-stage diagnosis and more effective therapies. Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role in lung cancer screening workflow for early diagnosis. Particularly, in low-dose computed tomography for screening programs, AI further reduces radiation dose maintaining an optimal image quality. AI also allows risk stratification and subsequent screening personalization. A computer-aided detection (CAD) system helps in lung nodule detection with a high sensibility, reducing imaging time interpretation. AI is additionally applied in nodule characterization (benign or malignant), using different approaches. This narrative review aims to provide an overall view of all possible AI applications in lung cancer screening. ABSTRACT: Lung cancer has one of the worst morbidity and fatality rates of any malignant tumour. Most lung cancers are discovered in the middle and late stages of the disease, when treatment choices are limited, and patients’ survival rate is low. The aim of lung cancer screening is the identification of lung malignancies in the early stage of the disease, when more options for effective treatments are available, to improve the patients’ outcomes. The desire to improve the efficacy and efficiency of clinical care continues to drive multiple innovations into practice for better patient management, and in this context, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role. AI may have a role in each process of the lung cancer screening workflow. First, in the acquisition of low-dose computed tomography for screening programs, AI-based reconstruction allows a further dose reduction, while still maintaining an optimal image quality. AI can help the personalization of screening programs through risk stratification based on the collection and analysis of a huge amount of imaging and clinical data. A computer-aided detection (CAD) system provides automatic detection of potential lung nodules with high sensitivity, working as a concurrent or second reader and reducing the time needed for image interpretation. Once a nodule has been detected, it should be characterized as benign or malignant. Two AI-based approaches are available to perform this task: the first one is represented by automatic segmentation with a consequent assessment of the lesion size, volume, and densitometric features; the second consists of segmentation first, followed by radiomic features extraction to characterize the whole abnormalities providing the so-called “virtual biopsy”. This narrative review aims to provide an overview of all possible AI applications in lung cancer screening.