Abstract: Lung cancer has been a major contribution to mortality rates world-wide for many years now. There is a need for early diagnosis of lung cancer which if implemented, will help in reducing mortality rates. Recently, image processing techniques have been widely applied in various medical facilities for accurate detection and diagnosis of abnormality in the body images like in various cancers such as brain tumour, breast tumour and lung tumour. This paper is a development of an algorithm based on medical image processing to segment the lung tumour in CT images due to the lack of such algorithms and approaches used to detect tumours. The work involves the application of different image processing tools in order to arrive at the desired result when combined and successively applied. The segmentation system comprises different steps along the process. First, Image preprocessing is done where some enhancement is done to enhance and reduce noise in images. In the next step, the different parts in the images are separated to be able to segment the tumour. In this phase threshold value was selected automatically. Then morphological operation (Area opening) is implemented on the thresholded image. Finally, the lung tumour is accurately segmented by subtracting the opened image from the thresholded image. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used to classify the lung tumour into 4 different types: Adenocarcinoma(AC), Large Cell Carcinoma(LCC) Squamous Cell Carcinoma(SCC), and No tumour (NT). Keywords: Lung tumour; image processing techniques; segmentation; thresholding; image enhancement; Support Vector Machine; Machine learning;
Image processing techniques for analyzing CT scan images towards the early detection of lung cancer