MRI breast cancer diagnosis hybrid approach using adaptive ant-based segmentation and multilayer perceptron neural networks classifier

摘要

This article introduces a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of fuzzy sets, ant-based clustering and multilayer perceptron neural networks (MLPNN) classifier, in conjunction with statistical-based feature extraction technique. An application of breast cancer MRI imaging has been chosen and hybridization system has been applied to see their ability and accuracy to classify the breast cancer images into two outcomes: Benign or Malignant. The introduced hybrid system starts with an algorithm based on type-II fuzzy sets to enhance the contrast of the input images. This is followed by an improved version of the classical ant-based clustering algorithm, called adaptive ant-based clustering to identify target objects through an optimization methodology that maintains the optimum result during iterations. Then, more than twenty statistical-based features are extracted and normalized. Finally, a MLPNN classifier was employed to evaluate the ability of the lesion descriptors for discrimination of different regions of interest to determine whether the cancer is Benign or Malignant. To evaluate the performance of presented approach, we present tests on different breast MRI images. The experimental results obtained, show that the adaptive ant-based segmentation is superior to the classical ant-based clustering technique and the overall accuracy offered by the employed hybrid technique confirm that the effectiveness and performance of the proposed hybrid system is high.