Uncertainty-aware deep learning-based CAD system for breast cancer classification using ultrasound and mammography images

Abstract

ABSTRACT Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in women. Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer can increase the treatment chances and decrease the mortality rate. Thus, the development of accurate and reliable Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems using breast cancer images is an immediate priority for early diagnosis. Deep learning methods have had a widespread role in CAD systems. In spite of the advantages, most deep learning-based CADs cannot quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. Uncertainty in the predicted results from a CAD system might endanger people’s life in these crucial steps for breast cancer classification. Therefore, in this study, the Monte Carlo Dropout method is utilised as an uncertainty quantification method. Furthermore, differently from most existing studies, we present an uncertainty-aware deep learning model which can classify accurately from different types of images, namely, mammograms and ultrasound. The results show the proposed model achieved the accuracy of 99.95% in mammogram dataset, namely, DDSM and 98.40% and 91.34% in ultrasound datasets, namely, BUSM and BUSI, respectively. Finally, since we found the proposed model shows high uncertainty in misclassifications, we suggested to use the uncertainty values to find appropriate subsets for further inspection to increase the performance.