Computer-Aided Detection and Diagnosis of Breast Cancer: a Review

Statistics across different countries point to breast cancer being among severe cancers with a high mortality rate. Early detection is essential when it comes to reducing the severity and mortality of breast cancer. Researchers proposed many computer-aided diagnosis/detection (CAD) techniques for this purpose. Many perform well (over 90% of classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and f-1 sore), nevertheless, there is still room for improvement. This paper reviews literature related to breast cancer and the challenges faced by the research community. It discusses the common stages of breast cancer detection/ diagnosis using CAD models along with deep learning and transfer learning (TL) methods. In recent studies, deep learning models outperformed the handcrafted feature extraction and classification task and the semantic segmentation of ROI images achieved good results. An accuracy of up to 99.8% has been obtained using these techniques. Furthermore, using TL, researchers combine the power of both, pre-trained deep learning-based networks and traditional feature extraction approaches.