BCNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Breast Cancer Grading

Breast cancer has become one of the most prevalent cancers by which people all over the world are affected and is posed serious threats to human beings, in a particular woman. In order to provide effective treatment or prevention of this cancer, disease diagnosis in the early stages would be of high importance. There have been various methods to detect this disorder in which using images have to play a dominant role. Deep learning has been recently adopted widely in different areas of science, especially medicine. In breast cancer detection problems, some diverse deep learning techniques have been developed on different datasets and resulted in good accuracy. In this article, we aimed to present a deep neural network model to classify histopathological images from the Databiox image dataset as the first application on this image database. Our proposed model named BCNet has taken advantage of the transfer learning approach in which VGG16 is selected from available pertained models as a feature extractor. Furthermore, to address the problem of insufficient data, we employed the data augmentation technique to expand the input dataset. All implementations in this research, ranging from pre-processing actions to depicting the diagram of the model architecture, have been carried out using tf.keras API. As a consequence of the proposed model execution, the significant validation accuracy of 88% and evaluation accuracy of 72% obtained.