An optimized ensemble model based on meta-heuristic algorithms for effective detection and classification of breast tumors

Abstract One of the most common cancers among women worldwide is breast cancer (BC), and early diagnosis can save lives. Early detection of BC increases the likelihood of a successful outcome by enabling treatment to start sooner. Even in areas without access to a specialist physician, machine learning (ML) aids in early BC detection. The medical imaging community is becoming more interested in using ML, and deep learning (DL) to increase the accuracy of cancer screening. Many disease-related data are sparse. However, for DL models to perform well, a large amount of data is required. Because of this, the DL models that are currently in use on medical images are not as effective as they could be. Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have recently gained popularity in the medical industry, and they perform admirably in terms of high performance and robustness at image classification. The proposed method classifies data using ensemble pre-trained models such as the dense convolutional network (DenseNet)-121 and EfficientNet-B5 feature extractor networks, as well as the support vector machine for classification. Using a modified meta-heuristic optimizer, the selected pre-trained CNN hyperparameters were optimized to improve the performance. The experimental results for the presented model on the INbreast dataset show that the EfficientNet-B5 model is effective for BC classification, with overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) values of 99.9%, 99.9%, 99.8%, 99.1%, 1.0, respectively.