Early breast cancer detection in CT scans using convolutional neural bidirectional feature pyramid network

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide. Early detection plays a crucial role in reducing mortality rates. While mammography is a widely used diagnostic tool, computed tomography (CT) scans are increasingly being explored for detecting breast cancer due to their high-resolution imaging and ability to visualize tissue in 3D. Despite the potential of CT scans in visualizing breast tissue in 3D with high resolution, extracting meaningful patterns from these scans is difficult due to the complex and nonlinear nature of the tissue features. The challenge lies in developing computational methods that can accurately detect and localize breast cancer lesions, especially when the tumors vary in size, shape, and density. In this article, we proposed a framework called convolutional neural bidirectional feature pyramid network, which integrates multi-scale feature extraction and bidirectional feature fusion for breast cancer detection in CT scans. The proposed framework classified the images into diseased and non-diseased and then identified the infected region on breast tissue. Using convolutional neural networks, we defined several layers to classify the diseased and normal CT scan images. We collected data on breast CT scans taken from the radiology department, Ayub Teaching Hospital Abbottabad, Pakistan. We evaluated the model using a variety of classification metrics such as precision, recall, F1-measure, and average precision to determine its effectiveness in finding breast cancer lesions, and we found 96.11% accuracy. Our findings show that compared with current state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework has satisfactory results in identifying breast cancer areas, and the proposed framework over the baselines has achieved a 1.71% improvement.