Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography Images: A CNN-Based Approach with Feature Selection

The prompt and accurate diagnosis of breast lesions, including the distinction between cancer, non-cancer, and suspicious cancer, plays a crucial role in the prognosis of breast cancer. In this paper, we introduce a novel method based on feature extraction and reduction for the detection of breast cancer in mammography images. First, we extract features from multiple pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models, and then concatenate them. The most informative features are selected based on their mutual information with the target variable. Subsequently, the selected features can be classified using a machine learning algorithm. We evaluate our approach using four different machine learning algorithms: neural network (NN), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM). Our results demonstrate that the NN-based classifier achieves an impressive accuracy of 92% on the RSNA dataset. This dataset is newly introduced and includes two views as well as additional features like age, which contributed to the improved performance. We compare our proposed algorithm with state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate its superiority, particularly in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. For the MIAS dataset, we achieve an accuracy as high as 94.5%, and for the DDSM dataset, an accuracy of 96% is attained. These results highlight the effectiveness of our method in accurately diagnosing breast lesions and surpassing existing approaches.