Breast Abnormality Diagnosis Using Transfer and Ensemble Learning

Abstract

Breast cancer is the second fatal disease among cancers both in Canada and across the globe. However, in the case of early detection, it can raise the survival rate. Thus, researchers and scientists have been practicing to develop Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD)x systems. Traditional CAD systems depend on manual feature extraction, which has provided radiologists with poor detection and diagnosis tools. However, recently the application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)s as one of the most impressive deep learning-based methods and one of its interesting techniques, Transfer Learning, has revolutionized the performance and development of these systems.

In medical diagnosis, one issue is distinguishing between breast mass lesions and calcifications (little deposits of calcium). This work offers a solution using transfer learning and ensemble learning (majority voting) at the first stage and later replacing the voting strategy with soft voting. Also, regardless of the abnormality's type (mass or calcification), the severeness of the abnormality plays a key role.

Nevertheless, in this study, we went further and made an effort to create a (CAD)x pathology diagnosis system. More specifically, after comparing multi-classification results with a two-staged abnormality diagnosis system, we propose the two-staged binary classifier as our final model. Thus, we offer a novel breast cancer diagnosis system using a wide range of pre-trained models in this study. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who integrate the application of a wide range of state-of-the-art pre-trained models, particularly including EfficientNet for the transfer learning part, and subsequently, employ ensemble learning. With the application of pre-trained CNN-based models or transfer learning, we are able to overcome the lack of large-size datasets. Moreover, with the EfficientNet family offering better results with fewer parameters, we achieved promising results in terms of accuracy and AUC-score, and later ensemble learning was applied to provide robustness for the network. After performing 10-fold cross-validation, our experiments yielded promising results; while constructing the breast abnormality classifier 0.96 ± 0.03 and 0.96 for accuracy and AUC-score, respectively. Similarly, it resulted in 0.85 ± 0.08 for accuracy and 0.81 for AUC-score when constructing pathology diagnosis.