Breast Tumor Classification and Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks

Breast cancer is considered as the most fatal type of cancer among women worldwide and it is crucially important to be diagnosed at its early stages. In the current study, we aim to represent a fast and efficient framework which consists of two main parts:1- image classification, and 2- tumor region segmentation. At the initial stage, the images are classified into the two categories of normal and abnormal. Since the Deep Neural Networks have performed successfully in machine vision task, we would employ the convolutional neural networks for the classification of images. In the second stage, the suggested framework is to diagnose and segment the tumor in the mammography images. First, the mammography images are pre-processed by removing noise and artifacts, and then, segment the image using the level-set algorithm based on the spatial fuzzy c-means clustering. The proper initialization and optimal configuration have strong effects on the performance of the level-set segmentation. Thus, in our suggested framework, we have improved the level-set algorithm by utilizing the spatial fuzzy c-means clustering which ultimately results in a more precise segmentation. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted experiments using the Mammographic Image Analysis (MIAS) dataset. The tests have shown that the convolutional neural networks could achieve high accuracy in classification of images. Moreover, the improved level-set segmentation method, along with the fuzzy c-means clustering, could perfectly do the segmentation on the tumor area. The suggested method has classified the images with the accuracy of 78% and the AUC of 69%, which, as compared to the previous methods, is 2% more accurate and 6% better AUC; and has been able to extract the tumor area in a more precise way.