On-cloud decision-support system for non-small cell lung cancer histology characterization from thorax computed tomography scans

Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) accounts for about 85% of all lung cancers. Developing non-invasive techniques for NSCLC histology characterization may not only help clinicians to make targeted therapeutic treatments but also prevent subjects from undergoing lung biopsy, which is challenging and could lead to clinical implications. The motivation behind the study presented here is to develop an advanced on-cloud decision-support system, named LUCY, for non-small cell LUng Cancer histologY characterization directly from thorax Computed Tomography (CT) scans. This aim was pursued by selecting thorax CT scans of 182 LUng ADenocarcinoma (LUAD) and 186 LUng Squamous Cell carcinoma (LUSC) subjects from four openly accessible data collections (NSCLC-Radiomics, NSCLC-Radiogenomics, NSCLC-Radiomics-Genomics and TCGA-LUAD), in addition to the implementation and comparison of two end-to-end neural networks (the core layer of whom is a convolutional long short-term memory layer), the performance evaluation on test dataset (NSCLC-Radiomics-Genomics) from a subject-level perspective in relation to NSCLC histological subtype location and grade, and the dynamic visual interpretation of the achieved results by producing and analyzing one heatmap video for each scan. LUCY reached test Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) values above 77% in all NSCLC histological subtype location and grade groups, and a best AUC value of 97% on the entire dataset reserved for testing, proving high generalizability to heterogeneous data and robustness. Thus, LUCY is a clinically-useful decision-support system able to timely, non-invasively and reliably provide visually-understandable predictions on LUAD and LUSC subjects in relation to clinically-relevant information.