Evaluation of morphological features for breast cells classification using neural networks

Rapid technology advancement has contributed towards achievements in medical applications. Cancer detection in its earliest stage is definitely very important for effective treatments. Innovation in diagnostic features of tumours may play a central role in development of new treatment methods. Thus, the purpose of this study is to evaluate proposed morphological features to classify breast cancer cells. In this paper, the morphological features were evaluated using neural networks. The features were presented to several neural networks architecture to investigate the most suitable neural network type for classifying the features effectively. The performance of the networks was compared based on resulted mean squared error, accuracy, false positive, false negative, sensitivity and specificity. The optimum network for classification of breast cancer cells was found using Hybrid Multilayer Perceptron (HMLP) network. The HMLP network was then employed to investigate the diagnostic capability of the features individually and in combination. The features were found to have important diagnostic capabilities. Training the network with a larger number of dominant morphological features was found to significantly increase the diagnostic capabilities. A combination of the proposed features gave the highest accuracy of 96%.