Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers afflicting women. Early detection and effective treatment are critical to improving the chances of survival. Since invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) accounts for 80% of all breast cancers, early detection of IDC cells plays an instrumental role in controlling cancer outcomes. While histopathological image analysis is the gold standard for detecting cancer, it is very challenging for pathologists to examine large patches of benign regions for identifying malignant cells. This process is not only prone to pathologists’ subjectivity but also quite time-consuming, laborious and expensive. Deep learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can mechanize the detection process to make it more objective, precise, and faster since they are good at learning predominant features automatically. However, lack of enough labelled and class balanced data samples are some of the practical challenges in adoption of deep learning methods for such problems. In this paper, we propose an image classification model using CNNs for IDC cell detection in histopathology slides. Further, we have performed a comparative analysis of some of the state-of-theart CNN architectures and applied transfer learning techniques. By trying out experiments on such kinds of models through transfer learning and optimization techniques, we have identified the most suitable transfer learning approach based on the EfficientNet-B7 network that has achieved accuracy of 90%, sensitivity of 91%, specificity of 90%, F1-score of 84% and balanced accuracy of 91%. This is an improvement on some of the previous research literature on this dataset. Through our approach, this research topic has focused on the benefits of using image classification problem with better accuracy and efficiency. This helps us in laying down a state-of-the-art approach for IDC detection through breast cancer histopathology image classification.
Keywords: deep learning, CNN architecture, accuracy, precision, transfer learning, hyperparameter tuning, learning rate
Vikash Sharma, Siddhartha Roy & Girdhar G. Agarwal (2023). Breast Cancer in Histopathological Data through Image Classification using Deep Learning Methods. Journal of Applied Statistics & Machine Learning. 2(1): pp. 1-37.