An Invasive Ductal Carcinomas Breast Cancer Grade Classification Using an Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks

Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Breast Cancer (IDC-BC) is the most common type of cancer and its asymptomatic nature has led to an increased mortality rate globally. Advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning have revolutionized the medical field with the development of AI-enabled computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, which help in determining diseases at an early stage. CAD systems assist pathologists in their decision-making process to produce more reliable outcomes in order to treat patients well. In this work, the potential of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) (i.e., EfficientNetV2L, ResNet152V2, DenseNet201), singly or as an ensemble, was thoroughly explored. The performances of these models were evaluated for IDC-BC grade classification using the DataBiox dataset. Data augmentation was used to avoid the issues of data scarcity and data imbalances. The performance of the best model was compared to three different balanced datasets of Databiox (i.e., 1200, 1400, and 1600 images) to determine the implications of this data augmentation. Furthermore, the effects of the number of epochs were analysed to ensure the coherency of the most optimal model. The experimental results analysis revealed that the proposed ensemble model outperformed the existing state-of-the-art techniques in relation to classifying the IDC-BC grades of the Databiox dataset. The proposed ensemble model of the CNNs achieved a 94% classification accuracy and attained a significant area under the ROC curves for grades 1, 2, and 3, i.e., 96%, 94%, and 96%, respectively.