TTCNN: A Breast Cancer Detection and Classification towards Computer-Aided Diagnosis Using Digital Mammography in Early Stages

Breast cancer is a major research area in the medical image analysis field; it is a dangerous disease and a major cause of death among women. Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer based on digital mammograms can enhance disease detection accuracy. Medical imagery must be detected, segmented, and classified for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to help the radiologists for accurate diagnosis of breast lesions. Therefore, an accurate breast cancer detection and classification approach is proposed for screening of mammograms. In this paper, we present a deep learning system that can identify breast cancer in mammogram screening images using an “end-to-end” training strategy that efficiently uses mammography images for computer-aided breast cancer recognition in the early stages. First, the proposed approach implements the modified contrast enhancement method in order to refine the detail of edges from the source mammogram images. Next, the transferable texture convolutional neural network (TTCNN) is presented to enhance the performance of classification and the energy layer is integrated in this work to extract the texture features from the convolutional layer. The proposed approach consists of only three layers of convolution and one energy layer, rather than the pooling layer. In the third stage, we analyzed the performance of TTCNN based on deep features of convolutional neural network models (InceptionResNet-V2, Inception-V3, VGG-16, VGG-19, GoogLeNet, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and ResNet-101). The deep features are extracted by determining the best layers which enhance the classification accuracy. In the fourth stage, by using the convolutional sparse image decomposition approach, all the extracted feature vectors are fused and, finally, the best features are selected by using the entropy controlled firefly method. The proposed approach employed on DDSM, INbreast, and MIAS datasets and attained the average accuracy of 97.49%. Our proposed transferable texture CNN-based method for classifying screening mammograms has outperformed prior methods. These findings demonstrate that automatic deep learning algorithms can be easily trained to achieve high accuracy in diverse mammography images, and can offer great potential to improve clinical tools to minimize false positive and false negative screening mammography results.