Recognition of Benign and Malignant Breast Ultrasound Images Based on Deep Transfer Learning

Abstract Manual recognition of breast ultrasound images is a heavy workload for radiologists and misdiagnosis. Traditional machine learning methods and deep learning methods require huge data sets and a lot of time for training. To solve the above problems, this paper had proposed a deep transfer learning method. the transfer learning models ResNet18 and ResNet50 after pre-training on the ImageNet dataset, and the ResNet18 and ResNet50 models without pre-training. The dataset consists of 131 breast ultrasound images (109 benign and 22 malignant), all of which had been collected, labeled and provided by UDIAT Diagnostic Center. The experimental results had shown that the pre-trained ResNet18 model has the best classification performance on breast ultrasound images. It had achieved an accuracy of 93.9%, an F1score of 0.94, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.944. Compared with ordinary deep learning models, its classification performance had been greatly improved, which had proved the significant advantages of deep transfer learning in the classification of small samples of medical images.