Detection and Classification of Histopathological Breast Images Using a Fusion of CNN Frameworks

Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 May 11;13(10):1700. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13101700.

Abstract

Breast cancer is responsible for the deaths of thousands of women each year. The diagnosis of breast cancer (BC) frequently makes the use of several imaging techniques. On the other hand, incorrect identification might occasionally result in unnecessary therapy and diagnosis. Therefore, the accurate identification of breast cancer can save a significant number of patients from undergoing unnecessary surgery and biopsy procedures. As a result of recent developments in the field, the performance of deep learning systems used for medical image processing has showed significant benefits. Deep learning (DL) models have found widespread use for the aim of extracting important features from histopathologic BC images. This has helped to improve the classification performance and has assisted in the automation of the process. In recent times, both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and hybrid models of deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated impressive performance. In this research, three different types of CNN models are proposed: a straightforward CNN model (1-CNN), a fusion CNN model (2-CNN), and a three CNN model (3-CNN). The findings of the experiment demonstrate that the techniques based on the 3-CNN algorithm performed the best in terms of accuracy (90.10%), recall (89.90%), precision (89.80%), and f1-Score (89.90%). In conclusion, the CNN-based approaches that have been developed are contrasted with more modern machine learning and deep learning models. The application of CNN-based methods has resulted in a significant increase in the accuracy of the BC classification.

Keywords: breast cancer; convolutional neural network; deep learning; histopathological images; machine learning.