Automated Lung Cancer Detection Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A Narrative Literature Review

Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States as well as worldwide. Radiologists and physicians experience heavy daily workloads, thus are at high risk for burn-out. To alleviate this burden, this narrative literature review compares the performance of four different artificial intelligence (AI) models in lung nodule cancer detection, as well as their performance to physicians/radiologists reading accuracy. A total of 648 articles were selected by two experienced physicians with over 10 years of experience in the fields of pulmonary critical care, and hospital medicine. The data bases used to search and select the articles are PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane library, Google Scholar, Web of science, IEEEXplore, and DBLP. The articles selected range from the years between 2008 and 2019. Four out of 648 articles were selected using the following inclusion criteria: 1) 18-65 years old, 2) CT chest scans, 2) lung nodule, 3) lung cancer, 3) deep learning, 4) ensemble and 5) classic methods. The exclusion criteria used in this narrative review include: 1) age greater than 65 years old, 2) positron emission tomography (PET) hybrid scans, 3) chest X-ray (CXR) and 4) genomics. The model performance outcomes metrics are measured and evaluated in sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve, and the area under the curve (AUC). This hybrid deep-learning model is a state-of-the-art architecture, with high-performance accuracy and low false-positive results. Future studies, comparing each model accuracy at depth is key. Automated physician-assist systems as this model in this review article help preserve a quality doctor-patient relationship.