CSA-Net: Channel and Spatial Attention-Based Network for Mammogram and Ultrasound Image Classification

Abstract

Breast cancer persists as a critical global health concern, emphasizing the advancement of reliable diagnostic strategies to improve patient survival rates. To address this challenge, a computer-aided diagnostic methodology for breast cancer classification is proposed. An architecture that incorporates a pre-trained EfficientNet-B0 model along with channel and spatial attention mechanisms is employed. The efficiency of leveraging attention mechanisms for breast cancer classification is investigated here. The proposed model demonstrates commendable performance in classification tasks, particularly showing significant improvements upon integrating attention mechanisms. Furthermore, this model demonstrates versatility across various imaging modalities, as demonstrated by its robust performance in classifying breast lesions, not only in mammograms but also in ultrasound images during cross-modality evaluation. It has achieved accuracy of 99.9% for binary classification using the mammogram dataset and 92.3% accuracy on the cross-modality multi-class dataset. The experimental results emphasize the superiority of our proposed method over the current state-of-the-art approaches for breast cancer classification.

Keywords

• attention mechanism
• breast cancer
• binary classification
• classification
• deep learning
• mammogram