Detection of breast cancer via deep convolution neural networks using MRI images

Breast cancer is the type of cancer that develops from cells in the breast tissue. It is the leading cancer in women. Early detection of the breast cancer tumor is crucial in the treatment process. Mammography is a valuable tool for identifying breast cancer in the early phase before physical symptoms develop. To reduce false-negative diagnosis in mammography, a biopsy is recommended for lesions with greater than a 2% chance of having suspected malignant tumors and, among them, less than 30 percent are found to have malignancy. To decrease unnecessary biopsies, recently, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has also been used to diagnose breast cancer. MRI is the highly recommended test for detecting and monitoring breast cancer tumors and interpreting lesioned regions since it has an excellent capability for soft tissue imaging. However, it requires an experienced radiologist and time-consuming process. On the other hand, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated better performance in image classification compared to feature-based methods and show promising performance in medical imaging. Herein, CNN was employed to characterize lesions as malignant or benign tumors using MRI images. Using only pixel information, a multi-layer CNN architecture with online data augmentation was designed. Later, the CNN architecture was trained and tested. The accuracy of the network is 98.33% and the error rate 0.0167. The sensitivity of the network is 1.0 whereas specificity is 0.9688. The precision is 0.9655. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature