AUTHOR=Prasada Rao R. Hari , Goswami Agam Das TITLE=Cnidaria herd optimized fuzzy C-means clustering enabled deep learning model for lung nodule detection JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physiology VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025 YEAR=2025 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2025.1511716 DOI=10.3389/fphys.2025.1511716 ISSN=1664-042X ABSTRACT=IntroductionLung nodule detection is a crucial task for diagnosis and lung cancer prevention. However, it can be extremely difficult to identify tiny nodules in medical images since pulmonary nodules vary greatly in shape, size, and location. Further, the implemented methods have certain limitations including scalability, robustness, data availability, and false detection rate.MethodsTo overcome the limitations in the existing techniques, this research proposes the Cnidaria Herd Optimization (CHO) algorithm-enabled Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (CHSTM) model for effective lung nodule detection. Furthermore, statistical and texture descriptors extract the significant features that aid in improving the detection accuracy. In addition, the FC2R segmentation model combines the optimized fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm and the Resnet −101 deep learning approach that effectively improves the performance of the model. Specifically, the CHO algorithm is modelled using the combination of the induced movement strategy of krill with the time control mechanism of the cnidaria to find the optimal solution and improve the CHSTM model’s performance.ResultsAccording to the experimental findings of a performance comparison between other established methods, the FC2R + CHSTM model achieves 98.09% sensitivity, 97.71% accuracy, and 97.03% specificity for TP 80 utilizing the LUNA-16 dataset. Utilizing the LIDC/IDRI dataset, the proposed approach attained a high accuracy of 97.59%, sensitivity of 96.77%, and specificity of 98.41% with k-fold validation outperforming the other existing techniques.ConclusionThe proposed FC2R + CHSTM model effectively detects lung nodules with minimum loss and better accuracy.