Computer-aided classification of breast cancer histopathological images

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most common types of cancer is breast cancer. The early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer has great importance in the treatment of the disease. In the diagnosis of breast cancer, histopathological analysis of cell and tissue specimens taken by biopsy is considered as the gold standard. Histopathological analysis is a tedious process that is highly dependent on the knowledge and experience of the pathologists. In this study; it is aimed to develop a computer-aided system that can reduce the workload of pathologists and help them in their diagnosis. An image set containing benign and malignant tumor images of breast cancer has been studied. To perform texture analysis on tumor images; first order statistics, Gabor and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) feature extraction methods have been applied. Then, various classifiers were applied to the obtained feature matrices and their performances were compared. The highest classification accuracy was achieved 82.06% by Random Forests classifier with feature combination of Gabor and GLCM methods. The results presented here show that computer-assisted diagnosis of breast cancer is a promising field.