Multi-Class Classification of Breast Cancer Using 6B-Net with Deep Feature Fusion and Selection Method

Breast cancer has now overtaken lung cancer as the world’s most commonly diagnosed cancer, with thousands of new cases per year. Early detection and classification of breast cancer are necessary to overcome the death rate. Recently, many deep learning-based studies have been proposed for automatic diagnosis and classification of this deadly disease, using histopathology images. This study proposed a novel solution for multi-class breast cancer classification from histopathology images using deep learning. For this purpose, a novel 6B-Net deep CNN model, with feature fusion and selection mechanism, was developed for multi-class breast cancer classification. For the evaluation of the proposed method, two large, publicly available datasets, namely, BreaKHis, with eight classes containing 7909 images, and a breast cancer histopathology dataset, containing 3771 images of four classes, were used. The proposed method achieves a multi-class average accuracy of 94.20%, with a classification training time of 226 s in four classes of breast cancer, and a multi-class average accuracy of 90.10%, with a classification training time of 147 s in eight classes of breast cancer. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed method achieves the highest multi-class average accuracy for breast cancer classification, and hence, the proposed method can effectively be applied for early detection and classification of breast cancer to assist the pathologists in early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer.