DeepBreastCancerNet: A Novel Deep Learning Model for Breast Cancer Detection Using Ultrasound Images

Breast cancer causes hundreds of women’s deaths each year. The manual detection of breast cancer is time-consuming, complicated, and prone to inaccuracy. For Breast Cancer (BC) detection, several imaging methods are explored. However, sometimes misidentification leads to unnecessary treatment and diagnosis. Therefore, accurate detection of BC can save many people from unnecessary surgery and biopsy. Due to recent developments in the industry, deep learning’s (DL) performance in processing medical images has significantly improved. Deep Learning techniques successfully identify BC from ultrasound images due to their superior prediction ability. Transfer learning reuses knowledge representations from public models built on large-scale datasets. However, sometimes Transfer Learning leads to the problem of overfitting. The key idea of this research is to propose an efficient and robust deep-learning model for breast cancer detection and classification. Therefore, this paper presents a novel DeepBraestCancerNet DL model for breast cancer detection and classification. The proposed framework has 24 layers, including six convolutional layers, nine inception modules, and one fully connected layer. Also, the architecture uses the clipped ReLu activation function, the leaky ReLu activation function, batch normalization and cross-channel normalization as its two normalization operations. We observed that the proposed model reached the highest classification accuracy of 99.35%. We also compared the performance of the proposed DeepBraestCancerNet approach with several existing DL models, and the experiment results showed that the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we validated the proposed model using another standard, publicaly available dataset. The proposed DeepBraestCancerNet model reached the highest accuracy of 99.63%.