A classification method for breast images based on an improved VGG16 network model

Breast cancer is the cancer with the highest incidence in women worldwide, and seriously threatens the lives and health of women. Mammography, which is commonly used for screening, is considered to be the most effective means of diagnosing breast cancer. Currently, computer-assisted breast mass systems based on mammography can help doctors improve film reading efficiency, but improving the accuracy of assisted diagnostic systems and reducing the false positive rate are still challenging tasks. In the image classification field, convolutional neural networks have obvious advantages over other classification algorithms. Aiming at the very small percentage of breast lesion area in breast X-ray images, in this paper, the classical VGG16 network model is improved by simplifying the network structure, optimizing the convolution form and introducing an attention mechanism. The improved model achieves 99.8 and 98.05% accuracy on the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) and The Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM), respectively, which is obviously superior to some methods of recent studies.