Comparison of Machine Learning Classifiers for the Detection of Breast Cancer in an Electrical Impedance Tomography Setup

Abstract

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death among women. Early prediction is crucial as it severely increases the survival rate. Although classical X-ray mammography is an established technique for screening, many eligible women do not consider this due to concerns about pain from breast compression. Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a technique that aims to visualize the conductivity distribution within the human body. As cancer has a greater conductivity than surrounding fatty tissue, it provides a contrast for image reconstruction. However, the interpretation of EIT images is still hard, due to the low spatial resolution. In this paper, we investigated three different classification models for the detection of breast cancer. This is important as EIT is a highly non-linear inverse problem and tends to produce reconstruction artifacts, which can be misinterpreted as, e.g., tumors. To aid in the interpretation of breast cancer EIT images, we compare three different classification models for breast cancer. We found that random forests and support vector machines performed best for this task.