Enhanced breast mass mammography classification approach based on pre-processing and hybridization of transfer learning models

The second most prevalent cause of death among women is now breast cancer, surpassing heart disease. Mammography images must accurately identify breast masses to diagnose early breast cancer, which can significantly increase the patient’s survival percentage. Although, due to the diversity of breast masses and the complexity of their microenvironment, it is still a significant issue. Hence, an issue that researchers need to continue searching into is how to establish a reliable breast mass detection approach in an effective factor application to increase patient survival. Even though several machine and deep learning-based approaches were proposed to address these issues, pre-processing strategies and network architectures were insufficient for breast mass detection in mammogram scans, which directly influences the accuracy of the proposed models.

Aiming to resolve these issues, we propose a two-stage classification method for breast mass mammography scans. First, we introduce a pre-processing stage divided into three sub-strategies, which include several filters for Region Of Interest (ROI) extraction, noise removal, and image enhancements. Secondly, we propose a classification stage based on transfer learning techniques for feature extraction, and global pooling for classification instead of standard machine learning algorithms or fully connected layers. However, instead of using the traditional fine-tuning feature extraction phase, we proposed a hybrid model where we concatenate two recent pre-trained CNNs to assist the feature extraction phase, rather than using one.

Using the CBIS-DDSM dataset, we managed to increase mainly each of the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity reaching the highest accuracy of 98,1% using the Median filter for noise removal. Followed by the Gaussian filter trial with 96% accuracy, meanwhile, the winner filter attained the lowest accuracy of 94.13%. Moreover, the usage of global average pooling as a classifier is suitable in our case better than global max pooling.

The experimental findings demonstrate that the suggested strategy of breast Mass detection in mammography can outperform the top-ranked methods currently in use in terms of classification performance.