Deep Learning Cascaded Feature Selection Framework for Breast Cancer Classification: Hybrid CNN with Univariate-Based Approach

With the help of machine learning, many of the problems that have plagued mammography in the past have been solved. Effective prediction models need many normal and tumor samples. For medical applications such as breast cancer diagnosis framework, it is difficult to gather labeled training data and construct effective learning frameworks. Transfer learning is an emerging strategy that has recently been used to tackle the scarcity of medical data by transferring pre-trained convolutional network knowledge into the medical domain. Despite the well reputation of the transfer learning based on the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for medical imaging, several hurdles still exist to achieve a prominent breast cancer classification performance. In this paper, we attempt to solve the Feature Dimensionality Curse (FDC) problem of the deep features that are derived from the transfer learning pre-trained CNNs. Such a problem is raised due to the high space dimensionality of the extracted deep features with respect to the small size of the available medical data samples. Therefore, a novel deep learning cascaded feature selection framework is proposed based on the pre-trained deep convolutional networks as well as the univariate-based paradigm. Deep learning models of AlexNet, VGG, and GoogleNet are randomly selected and used to extract the shallow and deep features from the INbreast mammograms, whereas the univariate strategy helps to overcome the dimensionality curse and multicollinearity issues for the extracted features. The optimized key features via the univariate approach are statistically significant ( p -value ≤ 0.05) and have good capability to efficiently train the classification models. Using such optimal features, the proposed framework could achieve a promising evaluation performance in terms of 98.50% accuracy, 98.06% sensitivity, 98.99% specificity, and 98.98% precision. Such performance seems to be beneficial to develop a practical and reliable computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) framework for breast cancer classification.