Diagnosis of breast cancer based on modern mammography using hybrid transfer learning

Multidimens Syst Signal Process. 2021;32(2):747-765. doi: 10.1007/s11045-020-00756-7. Epub 2021 Jan 11.

Abstract

Breast cancer is a common cancer in women. Early detection of breast cancer in particular and cancer, in general, can considerably increase the survival rate of women, and it can be much more effective. This paper mainly focuses on the transfer learning process to detect breast cancer. Modified VGG (MVGG) is proposed and implemented on datasets of 2D and 3D images of mammograms. Experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid transfer learning model (a fusion of MVGG and ImageNet) provides an accuracy of 94.3%. On the other hand, only the proposed MVGG architecture provides an accuracy of 89.8%. So, it is precisely stated that the proposed hybrid pre-trained network outperforms other compared Convolutional Neural Networks. The proposed architecture can be considered as an effective tool for radiologists to decrease the false negative and false positive rates. Therefore, the efficiency of mammography analysis will be improved.

Keywords: 3D mammography; Breast cancer; Convolutional neural networks; Hybrid transfer learning; Mammography; Medical image segmentation.