Breast ultrasound tumour classification: A Machine Learning—Radiomics based approach

Abstract

AbstractPrediction of breast tumour malignancy using ultrasound imaging, is an important step for early detection of breast cancer. An efficient prediction system can be a great help to improve the survival chances of the involved patients. In this work, a machine learning (ML)—radiomics based classification pipeline is proposed, to perform this predictive modelling task, in a much more efficient manner. Multiple different types of image features of the region of interests are considered in this work, followed by a recursive feature elimination based feature selection step. Furthermore, a synthetic minority oversampling technique based step is also included in the pipeline, to deal with the class imbalance problem, that is often present in medical imaging datasets. Various ML models are considered in the subsequent model training phase, on a publicly available breast ultrasound image dataset (BUSI). From experimental analysis it has been observed that, shape, texture and histogram oriented gradients related features are the most informative, with respect to the predictive modelling task. Furthermore, it was observed that ensemble learners such as random forest, gradient boosting and AdaBoost classifiers are able to achieve significant results with respect to multiple evaluation metrics. The proposed approach achieved the state‐of‐the‐art accuracy, area under the curve, F1‐score and Mathews correlation coefficient values of 0.974, 0.97, 0.94 and 0.959, respectively, on the BUSI dataset. Such kind of impressive results suggest that the proposed approach can have a very high practical utility, in real medical diagnostic settings.