Convolutional neural network-based models for diagnosis of breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most prevailing cancer in the world and each year affecting millions of women. It is also the cause of largest number of deaths in women dying in cancers. During the last few years, researchers are proposing different convolutional neural network models in order to facilitate diagnostic process of breast cancer. Convolutional neural networks are showing promising results to classify cancers using image datasets. There is still a lack of standard models which can claim the best model because of unavailability of large datasets that can be used for models’ training and validation. Hence, researchers are now focusing on leveraging the transfer learning approach using pre-trained models as feature extractors that are trained over millions of different images. With this motivation, this paper considers eight different fine-tuned pre-trained models to observe how these models classify breast cancers applying on ultrasound images. We also propose a shallow custom convolutional neural network that outperforms the pre-trained models with respect to different performance metrics. The proposed model shows 100% accuracy and achieves 1.0 AUC score, whereas the best pre-trained model shows 92% accuracy and 0.972 AUC score. In order to avoid biasness, the model is trained using the fivefold cross validation technique. Moreover, the model is faster in training than the pre-trained models and requires a small number of trainable parameters. The Grad-CAM heat map visualization technique also shows how perfectly the proposed model extracts important features to classify breast cancers.