A hybrid ensemble deep learning approach for reliable breast cancer detection

Abstract

Among the cancer diseases, breast cancer is considered one of the most prevalent threats requiring early detection for a higher recovery rate. Meanwhile, the manual evaluation of malignant tissue regions in histopathology images is a critical and challenging task. Nowadays, deep learning becomes a leading technology for automatic tumor feature extraction and classification as malignant or benign. This paper presents a proposed hybrid deep learning-based approach, for reliable breast cancer detection, in three consecutive stages: 1) fine-tuning the pre-trained Xception-based classification model, 2) merging the extracted features with the predictions of a two-layer stacked LSTM-based regression model, and finally, 3) applying the support vector machine, in the classification phase, to the merged features. For the three stages of the proposed approach, training and testing phases are performed on the BreakHis dataset with nine adopted different augmentation techniques to ensure generalization of the proposed approach. A comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed approach, with diverse metrics, shows that employing the LSTM-based regression model improves accuracy and precision metrics of the fine-tuned Xception-based model by 10.65% and 11.6%, respectively. Additionally, as a classifier, implementing the support vector machine further boosts the model by 3.43% and 5.22% for both metrics, respectively. Experimental results exploit the proposed approach's efficiency with outstanding reliability in comparison with the recent state-of-the-art approaches.