An optimal deep learning approach for breast cancer detection and classification with pre-trained CNN-based feature learning mechanism

Breast cancer (BC) is the most dominant kind of cancer, which grows continuously and serves as the second highest cause of death for women worldwide. Early BC prediction helps decrease the BC mortality rate and improve treatment plans. Ultrasound is a popular and widely used imaging technique to detect BC at an earlier stage. Segmenting and classifying the tumors from ultrasound images is difficult. This paper proposes an optimal deep learning (DL)-based BC detection system with effective pre-trained transfer learning models-based segmentation and feature learning mechanisms. The proposed system comprises five phases: preprocessing, segmentation, feature learning, selection, and classification. Initially, the ultrasound images are collected from the breast ultrasound images (BUSI) dataset, and the preprocessing operations, such as noise removal using the Wiener filter and contrast enhancement using histogram equalization, are performed on the collected data to improve the dataset quality. Then, the segmentation of cancer-affected regions from the preprocessed data is done using a dilated convolution-based U-shaped network (DCUNet). The features are extracted or learned from the segmented images using spatial and channel attention including densely connected convolutional network-121 (SCADN-121). Afterwards, the system applies an enhanced cuckoo search optimization (ECSO) algorithm to select the features from the extracted feature set optimally. Finally, the ECSO-tuned long short-term memory (ECSO-LSTM) was utilized to classify BC into '3' classes, such as normal, benign, and malignant. The experimental outcomes proved that the proposed system attains 99.86% accuracy for BC classification, which is superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods.