Breast cancer diagnosis from histopathological images using textural features and CBIR

Abstract

Currently, breast cancer diagnosis is an extensively researched topic. An effective method to diagnose breast cancer is to use histopathological images. However, extracting features from these images is a challenging task. Thus, we propose a method that uses phylogenetic diversity indexes to characterize images for creating a model to classify histopathological breast images into four classes - invasive carcinoma, in situ carcinoma, normal tissue, and benign lesion. The classifiers used were the most robust ones according to the existing literature: XGBoost, random forest, multilayer perceptron, and support vector machine. Moreover, we performed content-based image retrieval to confirm the classification results and suggest a ranking for sets of images that were not labeled. The results obtained were considerably robust and proved to be effective for the composition of a CADx system to help specialists at large medical centers.

Keywords: Breast cancer; Computer-aided diagnosis; Content-based image retrieval; Histopathological images; Medical images.