A study on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Transfer Learning and Ensemble Model for Breast Cancer Detection

In deep learning, transfer learning and ensemble models have shown promise in improving computer-aided disease diagnosis. However, applying the transfer learning and ensemble model is still relatively limited. Moreover, the ensemble model's development is ad-hoc, overlooks redundant layers, and suffers from imbalanced datasets and inadequate augmentation. Lastly, significant Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (D-CNNs) have been introduced to detect and classify breast cancer. Still, very few comparative studies were conducted to investigate the accuracy and efficiency of existing CNN architectures. Realising the gaps, this study compares the performance of D-CNN, which includes the original CNN, transfer learning, and an ensemble model, in detecting breast cancer. The comparison study of this paper consists of comparison using six CNN-based deep learning architectures (SE-ResNet152, MobileNetV2, VGG19, ResNet18, InceptionV3, and DenseNet-121), a transfer learning, and an ensemble model on breast cancer detection. Among the comparison of these models, the ensemble model provides the highest detection and classification accuracy of 99.94% for breast cancer detection and classification. However, this study also provides a negative result in the case of transfer learning, as the transfer learning did not increase the accuracy of the original SE-ResNet152, MobileNetV2, VGG19, ResNet18, InceptionV3, and DenseNet-121 model. The high accuracy in detecting and categorising breast cancer detection using CNN suggests that the CNN model is promising in breast cancer disease detection. This research is significant in biomedical engineering, computer-aided disease diagnosis, and ML-based disease detection.