Convolutional neural networks breast cancer classification using Palestinian mammogram dataset

Breast cancer is widespread across the globe. It’s the primary cause of death in cancer fatalities. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health annual report, it ranked as the third reported death of all reported cancer deaths in the West Bank. Mammogram screening is the most common technique to diagnose breast abnormalities, but there is a challenge in the lack of skilled experts able to accurately interpret mammograms. Machine learning plays an important role in medical image processing particularly in early detection when the treatment is less expensive and available. In this paper we proposed different convolutional neural network (CNN) models to detect breast abnormalities with promising results. Six CNN models were used in this research on a unique (first-hand) dataset collected from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The models are VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, ResNet50, Xception, and EfficientNetB7. Consequently, DenseNet121 outperformed other models with 0.83 and 0.85 for testing accuracy and area under curve (AUC) respectively. As a future work, the outperformed model can be combined with other patient data like genetic information, medical history, and lifestyle factors to evaluate the risk of developing specific diseases. This would increase the survival rate and enable proactive measures.