AI-Driven Tumor Characterization and Histological Subtype Classification in Lung Cancer Using CT Imaging

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Lung cancer is still one of the top cancer mortality causes around the world, and there is a need for an accurate and clinically reliable diagnostic tool. While Computed Tomography (CT) imaging is very useful for evaluation of pulmonary nodules and tumor morphology, its interpretation is complicated by inter-patient variability, imaging artifacts, low tissue contrast, and tumor heterogeneity. Although Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have enhanced the diagnostic process, handcrafted feature-based approaches often fail to capture complex tumor characteristics, and numerous deep learning systems lack clinical interpretability. To tackle these challenges, this study suggests a unified diagnostic approach to characterize the tumor comprehensively. Methods: Lung window intensity clipping and the MedSAM foundation model are used to segment the tumor regions. After segmentation, handcrafted texture, shape, morphology and keypoint features are extracted in addition to deep features extracted by ResNet50. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to select and refine the features, followed by an LSTM network that learns the sequential relationships among features for histological subtype classification. Results: It was observed that the proposed approach outperformed the benchmark approaches by attaining a higher accuracy of 93.70% and 94.70% on the Lung-PET-CT-Dx and LIDC-IDRI datasets, respectively. The ablation analysis supports the contribution of each module, clearly showing the progressive improvement of the overall classification performance obtained by integrating the complementary modules. Conclusions: The proposed framework effectively incorporated MedSAM-based tumor segmentation, radiomic feature analysis, and deep feature representation and sequential dependency modeling all in a single diagnostic workflow for lung cancer evaluation and diagnosis. These results prove its feasibility for explainable computer-aided diagnosis and decision support for lung cancer evaluation.