Employing transfer learning for breast cancer detection using deep learning models

Breast cancer remains a critical global health concern, affecting countless lives worldwide. Early and accurate detection plays a vital role in improving patient outcomes. The challenge lies with the limitations of traditional diagnostic methods in terms of accuracy. This study proposes a novel model based on the four pretrained deep learning models, Mobilenetv2, Inceptionv3, ResNet50, and VGG16, which were also used as feature extractors and fed on multiple supervised learning models using the BUSI dataset. Mobiletnetv2, inceptionv3, ResNet50 and VGG16 achieved an accuracy of 85.6%, 90.8%, 89.7% and 88.06%, respectively, with Logistic Regression and Light Gradient Boosting Machine being the best performing classifiers. Using transfer learning, the top layers of the model were frozen, and additional layers were added. A GlobalAveragePooling2D layer was employed to reduce spatial dimensions of the input image. After training and testing based on the accuracy, ResNet50 performed the best with 95.5%, followed by Inceptionv3 92.5%, VGG16 86.5% and lastly Mobilenetv2 84%.