Epidemiology of lung cancer and approaches for its prediction: a systematic review and analysis

Abstract

Background: Owing to the use of tobacco and the consumption of alcohol and adulterated food, worldwide cancer incidence is increasing at an alarming and frightening rate. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, lung cancer has been the most common cancer type. This study aimed to determine the global status of lung cancer and to evaluate the use of computational methods in the early detection of lung cancer.

Methods: We used lung cancer data from the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), India, and Egypt. For statistical analysis, we used incidence and mortality as well as survival rates to better understand the critical state of lung cancer.

Results: In the UK and the US, we found a significant decrease in lung cancer mortalities in the period of 1990-2014, whereas, in India and Egypt, such a decrease was not much promising. Additionally, we observed that, in the UK and the US, the survival rates of women with lung cancer were higher than those of men. We observed that the data mining and evolutionary algorithms were efficient in lung cancer detection.

Conclusions: Our findings provide an inclusive understanding of the incidences, mortalities, and survival rates of lung cancer in the UK, the US, India, and Egypt. The combined use of data mining and evolutionary algorithm can be efficient in lung cancer detection.

Keywords: Data mining; Evolutionary algorithms; Incidence and mortality rates; Lung cancer.

Fig. 1

One-year net survival trends of lung cancer patients in the United Kingdom (UK). During the period 1971–2011, the 1-year age-standardized (age 15–99 years) net survival rates of men with lung cancer increased from 16.2% to 30.4%; for women, the survival rate increased from 15.4% to 35.1% during the same period

Fig. 2

Five-year net survival trends of lung cancer patients in the UK. During the period 1971–2011, the 5-year age-standardized (age 15–99 years) net survival rates of men with lung cancer has increased from 4.8% to 8.4%; for women, the survival rate increased from 4.4% to 11.6% during the same period

Fig. 3

Ten-year net survival trends in the UK. During the period 1971–2011, the 10-year age-standardized (age 15–99 years) net survival rates of men with lung cancer increased from 3.2% to 4.0%; for women, the survival rate increased from 2.9% to 6.5% during the same period

Fig. 4

Five-year net survival rate of lung cancer patients by age in the United Kingdom (UK). During the period 2007–2011, the 5-year age-standardized net survival rates of men with lung cancer gradually decreased from 38.4% to 4.8%; for women, it decreased from 45.0% to 5.0%. This shows that the 5-year survival for lung cancer is highest in the youngest men and women and decreases with increasing age

Fig. 5

One-year relative survival trends of lung cancer patients in the United States (US). During the period 1975–2010, 1-year relative survival rate for men with lung cancer increased from 33.4% to 40.7%; for women, it increased from 40.4% to 48.5%

Fig. 6

Five-year relative survival trends of lung cancer patients over time in the US. The 5-year relative survival rate of men with lung cancer increased from 11.1% to 15.1%; for women, it increased from 16.1% to 20.2%

Fig. 7

Percentage of different methods used in lung cancer diagnosis. It shows the frequency of data mining methods and evolutionary algorithms used for lung cancer diagnosis, as reported in references [–70]

Fig. 8

Relationship of the incidence of various histological types of lung cancer with smoking in India