Analysis of Features for Breast Cancer Recognition in Different Magnifications of Histopathological Images

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases in women in the world. There are various imaging techniques employed in the diagnosis. The histological image analysis supported by computational systems has proved to be quite effective in diagnosing the disease. In this paper, we present an approach to quantify and classify tissue samples of the breast based on features extracted from the intensity histogram, co-occurrence matrix and the Shannon, Renyi, Tsallis and Kapoor entropies. The attribute set was employed to obtain the feature vectors which were evaluated as inputs to the random forest and sequential minimal optimization algorithms with the 10-fold cross-validation technique. In this study, we investigated the proposed approach with images obtained in four levels of magnification of the publicly available Breast Cancer Histopathological Database. In the feature selection stage, we investigated the correlation-Based feature selection, ReliefF, information gain, gain ratio, one-R and symmetrical uncertainty algorithms for evaluating the performance of the proposed approach. The proposed approach achieved significant results of AUC and accuracy for all cases analyzed. The proposed approach obtained 0.997 for AUC and 97.6% for the accuracy metric. These results are considered relevant and this approach is useful as an automated protocol for the diagnosis of breast histological tissue.