Attention-Enhanced Hybrid Bidirectional LSTM and Temporal Convolutional Network for Early Detection of Lung Cancer in Low-Dose CT Scans.

OBJECTIVES: We developed and evaluated a lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient hybrid deep learning model for multiclass classification of early lung cancer in low-dose CT scans, potentially deployable in resource-limited healthcare environments. METHODS: A novel hybrid architecture was developed that integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks, Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) blocks, and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME). The model employed depthwise separable convolutions to reduce computational complexity. A multi-stream feature extraction framework was implemented to enhance interpretability and capture spatial-temporal patterns. The model was trained and validated on the IQ-OTH/NCCD dataset (version 2), containing 3,609 CT scan slices from 110 patients (1,097 original, 2,512 augmented), across three classes: normal, benign, and malignant. The dataset was split into training (60%), validation (30%), and testing (10%) subsets. Training was conducted using the AdamW optimizer for 16 epochs. RESULTS: The model achieved 98.06% accuracy, 98.15% precision, 98.06% recall, and 98.04% F1-score, with a 99.88% AUC, a model size of 3.33 MB, and 279,561 parameters. CONCLUSION: The lightweight model achieves high diagnostic accuracy with computational efficiency, SHAP-based and LIME-based interpretability methods, enabling potential suitability for deployment in resource-constrained clinical settings.