EfficientNets transfer learning strategies for histopathological breast cancer image analysis

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the major principal sources of high mortality among women worldwide. Consequently, early detection is essential to save lives. BC can be diagnosed with different modes of medical images such as mammography, ultrasound, computerized tomography, biopsy, and magnetic resonance imaging. A histopathology study (biopsy) that results in images is often performed to help diagnose and analyze BC. Transfer learning (TL) is a machine-learning (ML) technique that reuses a learning method that is initially built for a task to be applied to a model for a new task. TL aims to enhance the assessment of desired learners by moving the knowledge contained in another but similar source domain. Consequently, the challenge of the small dataset in the desired domain is reduced to build the desired learners. TL plays a major role in medical image analysis because of this immense property. This paper focuses on the use of TL methods for the investigation of BC image classification and detection, preprocessing, pretrained models, and ML models. Through empirical experiments, the EfficientNets pretrained neural network architectures and ML classification models were built. The support vector machine and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) were learned on the BC dataset. The result showed a comparative but good performance of EfficientNetB4 and XGBoost. An outcome based on accuracy, recall, precision, and F1_Score for XGBoost is 84%, 0.80, 0.83, and 0.81, respectively.