Novel Algorithms for Early Cancer Diagnosis Using Transfer Learning with MobileNetV2 in Thermal Images

Abstract

Breast cancer ranks among the most prevalent forms of malignancy and foremost cause of death by cancer worldwide. It is not preventable. Early and precise detection is the only remedy for lowering the rate of mortality and improving the probability of survival for victims. In contrast to present procedures, thermography aids in the early diagnosis of cancer and thereby saves lives. But the accuracy experiences detrimental impact by low sensitivity for small and deep tumours and the subjectivity by physicians in interpreting the images. Employing deep learning approaches for cancer detection can enhance the efficacy. This study explored the utilization of thermography in early identification of breast cancer with the use of a publicly released dataset known as the DMR-IR dataset. For this purpose, we employed a novel approach that entails the utilization of a pre-trained MobileNetV2 model and fine tuning it through transfer learning techniques. We created three models using MobileNetV2: one was a baseline transfer learning model with weights trained from ImageNet dataset, the second was a fine-tuned model with an adaptive learning rate, and the third utilized early stopping with callbacks during fine-tuning. The results showed that the proposed methods achieved average accuracy rates of 85.15%, 95.19%, and 98.69%, respectively, with various performance indicators such as precision, sensitivity and specificity also being investigated.