This study introduces a class-balanced Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework specifically designed for the binary classification of breast tumors in digital mammography. The proposed method systematically addresses the pervasive issue of class imbalance in medical imaging datasets by implementing advanced dataset balancing strategies, which resulted in a significant reduction in false negatives that is critical in early breast cancer detection. The proposed architecture is designed for high-resolution mammograms and employs regularization techniques, such as dropout and L2 weight decay, which are intended to enhance generalization and reduce the risk of overfitting. Comprehensive data augmentation and normalization further enhance the model’s robustness and adaptability to real-world clinical variability. Evaluated on the MIAS dataset, our balanced CNN achieved an accuracy of 98.84%, exhibiting both sensitivity and overall reliability. This work demonstrates that a class-balanced CNN can deliver both high diagnostic accuracy and computational efficiency, indicating potential for future use in clinical screening workflows. The system’s ability to minimize diagnostic errors and support radiologists with reliable, data-driven predictions represents an exploratory step toward improving automated breast cancer detection.
Mavropoulos et al. (2026) studied this question.