A Novel Algorithm for Breast Mass Classification in Digital Mammography Based on Feature Fusion

Prompt diagnosis of benign and malignant breast masses is essential for early breast cancer screening. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to assist in the classification of benign and malignant breast masses. A persistent problem in current mammography mass classification via CNN is the lack of local-invariant features, which cannot effectively respond to geometric image transformations or changes caused by imaging angles. In this study, a novel model that trains both texton representation and deep CNN representation for mass classification tasks is proposed. Rotation-invariant features provided by the maximum response filter bank are incorporated with the CNN-based classification. The fusion after implementing the reduction approach is used to address the deficiencies of CNN in extracting mass features. This model is tested on public datasets, CBIS-DDSM, and a combined dataset, namely, mini-MIAS and INbreast. The fusion after implementing the reduction approach on the CBIS-DDSM dataset outperforms that of the other models in terms of area under the receiver operating curve (0.97), accuracy (94.30%), and specificity (97.19%). Therefore, our proposed method can be integrated with computer-aided diagnosis systems to achieve precise screening of breast masses.