Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer among women. Accurate diagnosis at an early stage can reduce the mortality associated with this disease. Governments and health organizations stress the importance of early detection of breast cancer as it is related to an increase in the number of available treatment options and increased survival. Early detection gives patients the best chance of receiving effective treatment. Different types of images and imaging modalities are used in the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. One of the imaging types is “infrared thermal” breast imaging, where a screening instrument is used to measure the temperature distribution of breast tissue. Although it has not been used often, compared to mammograms, it showed promising results when used for early detection. It also has many advantages as it is non-invasive, safe, painless, and inexpensive. The literature has indicated that the use of thermal images with deep neural networks improves the accuracy of early diagnosis of breast malformation. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to investigate to what extent convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with attention mechanisms (AMs) can provide satisfactory detection results in thermal breast cancer images. We present a model for breast cancer detection based on deep neural networks with AMs using thermal images from the Database for Research Mastology with Infrared Image (DMR-IR). The model will be evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, and will be compared against state-of-the-art breast cancer detection methods. The AMs with the CNN model achieved encouraging test accuracy rates of 99.46%, 99.37%, and 99.30% on the breast thermal dataset. The test accuracy of CNNs without AMs was 92.32%, whereas CNNs with AMs achieved an improvement in accuracy of 7%. Moreover, the proposed models outperformed previous models that were reviewed in the literature.

One of the most prevalent cancers in women is breast cancer. The mortality rate related to this disease can be decreased by early, accurate diagnosis to increase the chance of survival. Infrared thermal imaging is one of the breast imaging modalities in which the temperature of the breast tissue is measured using a screening tool. The previous studies did not use pre-trained deep learning (DL) with deep attention mechanisms (AMs) on thermographic images for breast cancer diagnosis. Using thermal images from the Database for Research Mastology with Infrared Image (DMR-IR), the study investigates the use of a pre-trained Visual Geometry Group with 16 layers (VGG16) with AMs that can produce good diagnosis performance utilizing the thermal images of breast cancer. The symmetry of the three models resulting from the combination of VGG16 with three types of AMs is evident in all its stages in methodology. The models were compared to state-of-art breast cancer diagnosis approaches and tested for accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1-score, AUC score, and Cohen’s kappa. The test accuracy rates for the AMs using the VGG16 model on the breast thermal dataset were encouraging, at 99.80%, 99.49%, and 99.32%. Test accuracy for VGG16 without AMs was 99.18%, whereas test accuracy for VGG16 with AMs improved by 0.62%. The proposed approaches also performed better than previous approaches examined in the related studies.

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