Mises-Fisher similarity-based boosted additive angular margin loss for breast cancer classification

Abstract To enhance the accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis, current practices rely on biopsies and microscopic examinations. However, this approach is known for being time-consuming, tedious, and costly. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise for their efficiency and high accuracy, training them effectively becomes challenging in real-world learning scenarios such as class imbalance, small-scale datasets, and label noises. Angular margin-based softmax losses, which concentrate on the angle between features and classifiers embedded in cosine similarity at the classification layer, aim to regulate feature representation learning. Nevertheless, the cosine similarity’s lack of a heavy tail impedes its ability to compactly regulate intra-class feature distribution, limiting generalization performance. Moreover, these losses are constrained to target classes when margin penalties are applied, which may not always optimize effectiveness. Addressing these hurdles, we introduce an innovative approach termed MF-BAM (Mises-Fisher Similarity-based Boosted Additive Angular Margin Loss), which extends beyond traditional cosine similarity and is anchored in the von Mises-Fisher distribution. MF-BAM not only penalizes the angle between deep features and their corresponding target class weights but also considers angles between deep features and weights associated with non-target classes. Through extensive experimentation on the BreaKHis dataset, MF-BAM achieves outstanding accuracies of 99.92%, 99.96%, 100.00%, and 98.05% for magnification levels of ×40, ×100, ×200, and ×400, respectively. Furthermore, additional experiments conducted on the BACH dataset for breast cancer classification, as well as on the LFW and YTF datasets for face recognition, affirm the generalization capability of our proposed loss function.