Benign and Malignant Breast Tumor Classification in Ultrasound and Mammography Images via Fusion of Deep Learning and Handcraft Features

Breast cancer is a disease that affects women in different countries around the world. The real cause of breast cancer is particularly challenging to determine, and early detection of the disease is necessary for reducing the death rate, due to the high risks associated with breast cancer. Treatment in the early period can increase the life expectancy and quality of life for women. CAD (Computer Aided Diagnostic) systems can perform the diagnosis of the benign and malignant lesions of breast cancer using technologies and tools based on image processing, helping specialist doctors to obtain a more precise point of view with fewer processes when making their diagnosis by giving a second opinion. This study presents a novel CAD system for automated breast cancer diagnosis. The proposed method consists of different stages. In the preprocessing stage, an image is segmented, and a mask of a lesion is obtained; during the next stage, the extraction of the deep learning features is performed by a CNN—specifically, DenseNet 201. Additionally, handcrafted features (Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)-based, ULBP-based, perimeter area, area, eccentricity, and circularity) are obtained from an image. The designed hybrid system uses CNN architecture for extracting deep learning features, along with traditional methods which perform several handcraft features, following the medical properties of the disease with the purpose of later fusion via proposed statistical criteria. During the fusion stage, where deep learning and handcrafted features are analyzed, the genetic algorithms as well as mutual information selection algorithm, followed by several classifiers (XGBoost, AdaBoost, Multilayer perceptron (MLP)) based on stochastic measures, are applied to choose the most sensible information group among the features. In the experimental validation of two modalities of the CAD design, which performed two types of medical studies—mammography (MG) and ultrasound (US)—the databases mini-DDSM (Digital Database for Screening Mammography) and BUSI (Breast Ultrasound Images Dataset) were used. Novel CAD systems were evaluated and compared with recent state-of-the-art systems, demonstrating better performance in commonly used criteria, obtaining ACC of 97.6%, PRE of 98%, Recall of 98%, F1-Score of 98%, and IBA of 95% for the abovementioned datasets.