Improving diagnosis and prognosis of lung cancer using vision
  transformers: A scoping review
Hazrat Ali Farida Mohsen Zubair Shah
Vision transformer-based methods are advancing the field of medical
artificial intelligence and cancer imaging, including lung cancer applications.
Recently, many researchers have developed vision transformer-based AI methods
for lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. This scoping review aims to identify
the recent developments on vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer
imaging applications. It provides key insights into how vision transformers
complemented the performance of AI and deep learning methods for lung cancer.
Furthermore, the review also identifies the datasets that contributed to
advancing the field. Of the 314 retrieved studies, this review included 34
studies published from 2020 to 2022. The most commonly addressed task in these
studies was the classification of lung cancer types, such as lung squamous cell
carcinoma versus lung adenocarcinoma, and identifying benign versus malignant
pulmonary nodules. Other applications included survival prediction of lung
cancer patients and segmentation of lungs. The studies lacked clear strategies
for clinical transformation. SWIN transformer was a popular choice of the
researchers; however, many other architectures were also reported where vision
transformer was combined with convolutional neural networks or UNet model. It
can be concluded that vision transformer-based models are increasingly in
popularity for developing AI methods for lung cancer applications. However,
their computational complexity and clinical relevance are important factors to
be considered for future research work. This review provides valuable insights
for researchers in the field of AI and healthcare to advance the
state-of-the-art in lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. We provide an
interactive dashboard on lung-cancer.onrender.com/.