Breast cancer is a leading cause of mortality among women worldwide. Early detection is crucial for increasing patient survival rates. Artificial intelligence, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has enabled the development of effective diagnostic systems by digitally processing mammograms. CNNs have been widely used for the classification of breast cancer in images, obtaining accurate results similar in many cases to those of medical specialists. This work presents a hybrid feature extraction approach for breast cancer detection that employs variants of EfficientNetV2 network and convenient image representation based on phase features. First, a region of interest (ROI) is extracted from the mammogram. Next, a three-channel image is created using the local phase, amplitude, and orientation features of the ROI. A feature vector is constructed for the processed mammogram using the developed CNN model. The size of the feature vector is reduced using simple statistics, achieving a redundancy suppression of 99.65%. The reduced feature vector is classified as either malignant or benign using a classifier ensemble. Experimental results using a training/testing ratio of 70/30 on 15,506 mammography images from three datasets produced an accuracy of 86.28%, a precision of 78.75%, a recall of 86.14%, and an F1-score of 80.09% with the modified EfficientNetV2 model and stacking classifier. However, an accuracy of 93.47%, a precision of 87.61%, a recall of 93.19%, and an F1-score of 90.32% were obtained using only CSAW-M dataset images.
Molina-Molina et al. (Tue,) studied this question.