A Convolution Neural Network for rapid and accurate staging of Breast Cancer based on Mammography

Introduction Breast cancer (BC) has been one of the main reasons for women’s deaths in the recent decade. This study hypothesizes that the deep features resulting from mammography staging can be used to determine tumor staging and lymph nodes of the sentinel lymph node (SLN) before surgery in BC patients. Methods A retrospective study of female BC patients being treated. Pathological variables were collected from medical records, including age, tumor location, staging based on the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), pathological type, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status, Progesterone Receptor (PR) status, and Estrogen Receptor (ER) status. The contrast enhancement technique with Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) was applied to the studied data using MATLAB software. The images were first changed from color to gray in the preprocessing process, and then the images were changed from gray to color again. The regions of interest (ROI) of the primary tumor were isolated from other areas of breast tissue by two expert radiologists. Therefore, a proposed convolution neural network (CNN) model was applied. Results In this study, 390 patients' information was used to analyze the data. In total, out of 390 patients, 300 had metastatic SLN involvement, and 390 had a tumor size greater than 1 mm. Performance evaluation of the proposed CNN staging was AUC 0.919 (95% CI: 0.852,0.971) for the training group and AUC 0.877 (95% CI: 0.805,0.949) for the validation group. Conclusions This study proposes a deep learning model based on CNN based on mammographic images, which has a suitable function for determining tumor staging and SLN metastasis.