Deep hybrid architectures for binary classification of medical breast cancer images

The diagnosis of breast cancer in the early stages significantly decreases the mortality rate by allowing the choice of adequate treatment. This study developed and evaluated twenty-eight hybrid architectures combining seven recent deep learning techniques for feature extraction (DenseNet 201, Inception V3, Inception ReseNet V2, MobileNet V2, ResNet 50, VGG16, and VGG19), and four classifiers (MLP, SVM, DT, and KNN) for a binary classification of breast pathological images over the BreakHis and FNAC datasets. The designed architectures were evaluated using: (1) four classification performance criteria (accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score), (2) Scott Knott (SK) statistical test to cluster the proposed architectures and identify the best cluster of the outperforming architectures, and (3) the Borda Count voting method to rank the best performing architectures. The results showed the potential of combining deep learning techniques for feature extraction and classical classifiers to classify breast cancer in malignant and benign tumors. The hybrid architecture using the MLP classifier and DenseNet 201 for feature extraction (MDEN) was the top performing architecture with higher accuracy values reaching 99% over the FNAC dataset, 92.61%, 92%, 93.93%, and 91.73% over the four magnification factor values of the BreakHis dataset: 40X, 100X, 200X, and 400X, respectively. The results of this study recommend the use of hybrid architectures using DenseNet 201 for the feature extraction of the breast cancer histological images because it gave the best results for both datasets BreakHis and FNAC, especially when combined with the MLP classifier.

Automated summary

This study combined multiple deep learning techniques and traditional classifiers for the classification of breast cancer images, achieving high accuracy results. Among them, the hybrid architecture using the MLP classifier and DenseNet 201 for feature extraction showed the best performance.