Establishment of a deep feature-based classification model for distinguishing benign and malignant breast tumors on full-filed digital mammography

Abstract

To develop a deep features-based model to classify benign and malignant breast lesions on full- filed digital mammography. The data of full-filed digital mammography in both craniocaudal view and mediolateral oblique view from 106 patients with breast neoplasms were analyzed. Twenty-three handcrafted features (HCF) were extracted from the images of the breast tumors and a suitable feature set of HCF was selected using t-test. The deep features (DF) were extracted from the 3 pre-trained deep learning models, namely AlexNet, VGG16 and GoogLeNet. With abundant breast tumor information from the craniocaudal view and mediolateral oblique view, we combined the two extracted features (DF and HCF) as the two-view features. A multi-classifier model was finally constructed based on the combined HCF and DF sets. The classification ability of different deep learning networks was evaluated. Quantitative evaluation results showed that the proposed HCF+DF model outperformed HCF model, and AlexNet produced the best performances among the 3 deep learning models. The proposed model that combines DF and HCF sets of breast tumors can effectively distinguish benign and malignant breast lesions on full-filed digital mammography.