Multi-Method Diagnosis of Histopathological Images for Early Detection of Breast Cancer Based on Hybrid and Deep Learning

Breast cancer (BC) is a type of cancer suffered by adult females worldwide. A late diagnosis of BC leads to death, so early diagnosis is essential for saving lives. There are many methods of diagnosing BC, including surgical open biopsy (SOB), which however constitutes an intense workload for pathologists to follow SOB and additionally takes a long time. Therefore, artificial intelligence systems can help by accurately diagnosing BC earlier; it is a tool that can assist doctors in making sound diagnostic decisions. In this study, two proposed approaches were applied, each with two systems, to diagnose BC in a dataset with magnification factors (MF): 40x, 100x, 200x, and 400x. The first proposed method is a hybrid technology between CNN (AlexNet and GoogLeNet) models that extracts features and classify them using the support vector machine (SVM). Thus, all BC datasets were diagnosed using AlexNet + SVM and GoogLeNet + SVM. The second proposed method diagnoses all BC datasets by ANN based on combining CNN features with handcrafted features extracted using the fuzzy color histogram (FCH), local binary pattern (LBP), and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), which collectively is called fusion features. Finally, the fusion features were fed into an artificial neural network (ANN) for classification. This method has proven its superior ability to diagnose histopathological images (HI) of BC accurately. The ANN algorithm based on fusion features achieved results of 100% for all metrics with the 400x dataset.

Automated summary

Breast cancer is a global health concern for adult females, and early diagnosis is crucial for saving lives. This study proposes two approaches, one combining CNN and SVM, and the other combining CNN features with handcrafted features and using ANN for classification. The latter method has demonstrated superior accuracy in diagnosing breast cancer.