Deep learning approaches for data augmentation and classification of breast masses using ultrasound images

Breast classification and detection using ultrasound imaging is considered a significant step in computer-aided diagnosis systems. Over the previous decades, researchers have proved the opportunities to automate the initial tumor classification and detection. The shortage of popular datasets of ultrasound images of breast cancer prevents researchers from obtaining a good performance of the classification algorithms. Traditional augmentation approaches are firmly limited, especially in tasks where the images follow strict standards, as in the case of medical datasets. Therefore besides the traditional augmentation, we use a new methodology for data augmentation using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We achieved higher accuracies by integrating traditional with GAN-based augmentation. This paper uses two breast ultrasound image datasets obtained from two various ultrasound systems. The first dataset is our dataset which was collected from Baheya Hospital for Early Detection and Treatment of Women's Cancer, Cairo (Egypt), we name it (BUSI) referring to Breast Ultrasound Images (BUSI) dataset. It contains 780 images (133 normal, 437 benign and 210 malignant). While the Dataset (B) is obtained from related work and it has 163 images (110 benign and 53 malignant). To overcome the shortage of public datasets in this field, BUSI dataset will be publicly available for researchers. Moreover, in this paper, deep learning approaches are proposed to be used for breast ultrasound classification. We examine two different methods: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach and a Transfer Learning (TL) approach and we compare their performance with and without augmentation. The results confirm an overall enhancement using augmentation methods with deep learning classification methods (especially transfer learning) when evaluated on the two datasets. © 2018 The Science and Information (SAI) Organization Limited.