Transfer learning and fine tuning in breast mammogram abnormalities classification on CBIS-DDSM database

Abstract

Breast cancer has an important incidence in women mortality worldwide. Currently, mam-mography is considered the gold standard for breast abnormalities screening examinations, since it aids in the early detection and diagnosis of the illness. However, both identification of mass lesions and its malignancy classification is a challenging problem for artificial intelligence. In this work, we extend our previous research in mammogram classification, where we studied NasNet and MobileNet in transfer learning to train a breast abnormality malignancy classifier, and include models like: VGG, Resnet, Xception and Resnext. However, training deep learning models tends to overfit. This problem is also carried out in this work. Our results show that Fine Tuning achieves the best classifier performance in VGG16 with AUC value of 0.844 in the CBIS-DDSM dataset.