Breast Fine Needle Cytological Classification Using Deep Hybrid Architectures

Diagnosis of breast cancer in the early stages allows to significantly decrease the mortality rate by allowing to choose the adequate treatment. This paper develops and evaluates twenty-eight hybrid architectures combining seven recent deep learning techniques for feature extraction (DenseNet 201, Inception V3, Inception ReseNet V2, MobileNet V2, ResNet 50, VGG16 and VGG19), and four classifiers (MLP, SVM, DT and KNN) for binary classification of breast cytological images over the FNAC dataset. To evaluate the designed architectures, we used: (1) four classification performance criterias (accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score), (1) Scott Knott (SK) statistical test to cluster the developed architectures and identify the best cluster of the outperforming architectures, and (2) Borda Count voting method to rank the best performing architectures. Results showed the potential of combining deep learning techniques for feature extraction and classical classifiers to classify breast cancer in malignant and benign tumors. The hybrid architectures using MLP classifier and DenseNet 201 for feature extraction were the top performing architectures with a higher accuracy value reaching 99% over the FNAC dataset. As results, the findings of this study recommend the use of the hybrid architectures using DenseNet 201 for the feature extraction of the breast cancer cytological images since it gave the best results for the FNAC data images, especially if combined with the MLP classifier. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.