A Novel Breast Cancer Diagnosis Scheme With Intelligent Feature and Parameter Selections

Background and Objective Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer among women, which contributes to the global death rate. The key to increasing the survival rate of affected patients is early diagnosis along with appropriate treatments. Manual methods for breast cancer diagnosis fail due to human errors, inaccurate diagnoses, and are time-consuming when demands are high. Intelligent systems based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for automated breast cancer diagnosis are powerful due to their strong decision-making capabilities in complicated cases. Artificial Bee Colony, Artificial Immune System, and Bacterial Foraging Optimization are swarm intelligence algorithms that solve combinatorial optimization problems. This paper proposes two novel hybrid Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization algorithms that overcome the demerits of standard ABC algorithms. First, this paper proposes a hybrid ABC approach called HABC, in which the standard ABC optimization is hybridized with a modified clonal selection algorithm of the Artificial Immune System that eliminates the poor exploration capabilities of standard ABC optimization. Further, this paper proposes a novel hybrid Artificial Bee Colony (Hybrid ABC) optimization where the strong explorative capabilities of the chemotaxis phase of the bacterial foraging optimization are integrated with a spiral model-based exploitative phase of the ABC by which the proposed Hybrid ABC overcomes the demerits of poor exploration and exploitation of the standard ABC algorithm. Methods In this work, the two proposed hybrid approaches were used in concurrent feature selection and parameter optimization of an ANN model. The proposed algorithm is implemented using various back-propagation algorithms, including resilient back-propagation (HABC-RP and Hybrid ABC-RP), Levenberg Marquart (HABC-LM and Hybrid ABC-LM), and momentum-based gradient descent (HABC-MGD and Hybrid ABC-GD) for parameter tuning of ANN. The Wisconsin breast cancer dataset was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of accuracy, complexity, and computational time. Results The mean accuracy of the proposed HABC-RP was 99.14% and 99.54% for Hybrid ABC which is better than the results found in the existing literature. HABC-RP attained a sensitivity of 98.32%, a specificity of 99.63%, and a precision of 99.38% whereas Hybrid ABC attained sensitivity of 99.08% and Specificity of 99.81%. Conclusions HABC-RP and Hybrid ABC-RP yielded high accuracy with a low complexity ANN structure compared to other variants. After evaluation, interestingly it is found that the Hybrid ABC-RP has achieved the highest mean accuracy of 99.54% with low complexity of 10.25 mean connections when compared to other variants proposed in this paper. It can be concluded that the concurrent selection of input features and tuning of parameters of ANN plays a vital role in increasing the accuracy of a breast cancer diagnosis. The proposed HABC-RP and Hybrid ABC-RP showed better results when compared to the existing breast cancer diagnosis systems taken for comparison. In the future, the proposed two-hybrid approaches can be used to generate optimal thresholds for the segmentation of tumors in abnormal images. HABC and Hybrid ABC can be used for tuning the parameters of various classifiers.