Breast Cancer Mass Classification Using Machine Learning, Binary-Coded Genetic Algorithms and an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning

The diagnosis of breast cancer (BC) as early as possible is crucial for increasing the survival rate. Mammography enables finding the breast tissue changes years before they could develop into cancer symptoms. In this study, machine learning methods for BC mass pathology classification have been investigated using the radiologists’ mass annotations on the screen-film mammograms of the Breast Cancer Digital Repository (BCDR). The performances of precomputed features in the BCDR and discrete wavelet transform followed by Radon transform have been investigated by using four sequential feature selections and three genetic algorithms. Feature fusion from craniocaudal and mediolateral oblique views was shown to increase the performance of the classifier. Mass classification has been implemented by deep transfer learning (DTL) using the weights of ResNet50, NASNetLarge and Xception networks. An ensemble of DTL (EDTL) was shown to have higher classification performance than the DTL models. The proposed EDTL has area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) scores of 0.8843 and 0.9089 for mass classification on the region of interest (ROI) and ROI union datasets, respectively. The proposed EDTL has the highest BC mass classification AUC score on the BCDR to date and may be useful for other datasets.