End-to-end improved convolutional neural network model for breast cancer detection using mammographic data

Abstract

Any disease is curable if it is diagnosed at the early stages with the help of a little human effort. The disease breast cancer is the second leading cause of death among women after lung cancer. Mammography is one of the most mainstream clinical imaging modalities that are utilized for early recognition of breast cancer. Early breast cancer detection helps to alleviate unnecessary treatments as well as saving women’s lives. The speedy development in deep learning and some of the strategies of machine learning have invigorated abundant enthusiasm for their application to clinical imaging issues. This paper presents an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model that consists of three convolutional layers where the starting layer searches for low-level features and the ending layer searches for high-level features. Two activation functions, that is, the Rectified Linear Unit and sigmoid functions, are utilized for the detection of breast cancer using digitized film mammograms from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography. The proposed convolutional neural system for identifying breast malignancy on mammogram imaging achieved praiseworthy execution on examination with prior models. The experimentation found that the model achieved has a true positive rate of 99% (accuracy = 97.20%, precision = 99%, true negative rate = 96%, F-score = 0.99, balanced classification rate = 0.975, Youden’s index = 0.95). The proposed improved CNN model can be used as a second opinion of doctors to detect breast cancer.