Breast mass classification based on cytological patterns using RBFNN and SVM

Correct diagnosis is one of the major problems in medical field. This includes the limitation of human expertise in diagnosing the disease manually, From the literature it has been found that pattern classification techniques such as support vector machines (SVM) and radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) can help them to improve in this domain. RBFNN and SVM with their remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques. This paper compares the use of polynomial kernel of SVM and RBFNN in ascertaining the diagnostic accuracy of cytological data obtained from the Wisconsin breast cancer database. The data set includes nine different attributes and two categories of tumors namely benign and malignant. Known sets of cytologically proven tumor data was used to train the models to categorize cancer patients according to their diagnosis. Performance measures such as accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, F-score and other metrics used in medical diagnosis such as Youden's index and discriminant power were evaluated to convey and compare the qualities of the classifiers. This research has demonstrated that RBFNN outperformed the polynomial kernel of SVM for correctly classifying the tumors. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.