Automated breast cancer detection using hybrid extreme learning machine classifier

Breast cancer has been identified as one of the major diseases that have led to the death of women in recent decades. Mammograms are extensively used by physicians to diagnose breast cancer. The selection of appropriate image enhancement, segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection and prediction algorithm plays an essential role in precise cancer diagnosis on mammograms and remains as a major task in the research field. Classification methods predict the class label for unlabeled dataset based on its proximity to the learnt pattern. The selected features obtained after feature selection are classified using an extreme learning machines (ELM) to three classes with the classes being normal, benign and malignant. Low generalisation performance is the problem which happens due to the ill-conditioned output matrix of the hidden layer of the classifier. The optimisation algorithms would resolve these issues because of their global searching ability. This paper proposes ELM with Fruitfly Optimisation Algorithm (ELM-FOA) to tune the input weight to obtain optimum output at the ELM’s hidden node to obtain the solution analytically. The testing sensitivity and precision of ELM-FOA are 97.5% and 100% respectively. The developed method can detect the calcifications and tumours with 99.04% accuracy. The optimal selection of preprocessing and segmentation algorithms, features from multiple feature filters and the efficient classifier algorithm meliorate the performance of the approach.