Diagnosis of Breast Cancer Using Intelligent Information Systems Techniques

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women worldwide. Early diagnosis of this illness can increase the chances of long-term survival of cancerous patients. To help in this aid, computerized breast cancer diagnosis systems are being developed. Machine learning algorithms and data mining techniques play a central role in the diagnosis. This paper describes neural network based approaches to breast cancer diagnosis. The aim of this research is to investigate and compare the performance of supervised and unsupervised neural networks in diagnosing breast cancer. A multilayer perceptron has been implemented as a supervised neural network and a self-organizing map as an unsupervised one. Both models were simulated using a variety of parameters and tested using several combinations of those parameters in independent experiments. It was concluded that the multilayer perceptron neural network outperforms Kohonen's self-organizing maps in diagnosing breast cancer even with small data sets.