Comparison of different CNNs for breast tumor classification from ultrasound images

Breast cancer is one of the deadliest cancer worldwide. A timely detection could reduce mortality rates. In the clinical routine, classifying benign and malignant tumors from ultrasound (US) imaging is a crucial but challenging task. An automated method, which can deal with the variability of data is therefore needed. In this paper, we compared different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transfer learning methods for the task of automated breast tumor classification. The architectures investigated in this study were VGG-16 and Inception V3. Two different training strategies were investigated: the first one was using pretrained models as feature extractors and the second one was to fine tune the pretrained models. A total of 947 images were used, 587 corresponded to US images of benign tumors and 360 with malignant tumors. 678 images were used for the training and validation process, while 269 images were used for testing the models. Accuracy and Area Under the receiver operation characteristic Curve (AUC) were used as performance metrics. The best performance was obtained by fine tuning VGG-16, with an accuracy of 0.919 and an AUC of 0.934. The obtained results open the opportunity to further investigation with a view of improving cancer detection.