Received 20 February 2023, accepted 7 March 2023, date of publication 15 March 2023, date of current version 22 March 2023.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3257562

A Transfer Learning Approach to Breast Cancer

Classification in a Federated Learning Framework
Y. NGUYEN TAN1 , VO PHUC TINH1 , PHAM DUC LAM2 , NGUYEN HOANG NAM3 ,
AND TRAN ANH KHOA 3
1 Faculty
of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City 700000, Vietnam
2 Faculty
of Engineering and Technology, Nguyen Tat Thanh University, Ho Chi Minh City 700000, Vietnam
3 ModelingEvolutionary Algorithms Simulation and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ton Duc Thang University,
Ho Chi Minh City 700000, Vietnam
Corresponding author: Tran Anh Khoa (trananhkhoa@[Link])
This work was supported by Funding no 37/qd-khcn/2023 of Nghe An Department of Science and Technology.

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have seen strong development. Many applications
now use AI to diagnose breast cancer. However, most new research has only been conducted in centralized
learning (CL) environments, which entails the risk of privacy breaches. Moreover, the accurate identification
and localization of lesions and tumor prediction using AI technologies is expected to increase patients’
likelihood of survival. To address these difficulties, we developed a federated learning (FL) facility that
extracts features from participating environments rather than a CL facility. This study’s novel contributions
include (i) the application of transfer learning to extract data features from the region of interest (ROI) in
an image, which aims to enable careful pre-processing and data enhancement for data training purposes;
(ii) the use of synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) to process data, which aims to more
uniformly classify data and improve diagnostic prediction performance for diseases; (iii) the application
of FeAvg-CNN + MobileNet in an FL framework to ensure customer privacy and personal security; and
(iv) the presentation of experimental results from different deep learning, transfer learning and FL models
with balanced and imbalanced mammography datasets, which demonstrate that our solution leads to much
higher classification performance than other approaches and is viable for use in AI healthcare applications.

INDEX TERMS Artificial intelligence, synthetic minority oversampling, federated learning, transfer
learning, breast cancer.

I. INTRODUCTION access to treatment have become increasingly prevalent issues

According to statistics published by the International Agency that require more attention and follow-up. Breast cancer is a
for Research on Cancer in December 2020, breast cancer malignant tumor of the breast. A tumor can be benign (non-
has overtaken lung cancer as the most diagnosed cancer cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). Most breast cancers
worldwide [1]. Over the past two decades, the total number begin in the milk ducts, with a small percentage of cases
of people diagnosed with cancer has nearly doubled, from developing in the milk sacs or lobules. If detected and treated
an estimated 10 million in 2000 to 19.3 million in 2020. late, breast cancer may metastasize to the bones and other
Today, one in five people worldwide will develop cancer organs and the pain will multiply.
in their lifetime. It is estimated that the number of people Therefore, early detection of breast cancer is critical for
diagnosed with cancer will further increase in the future: treating and saving patients. When the disease is in its early
nearly 50% by 2040 compared to 2020. The number of people stages, its manifestations may not be accurate and precise;
who die from cancer has also increased, from 6.2 million as a result, many abnormalities may be overlooked [2]. Cur-
in 2000 to 10 million in 2020. Late diagnosis and a lack of rently, many studies apply machine learning to improve early
detection, reduce the risk of death, and prolong the patient’s
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and life. However, sharing patient data is not widely considered
approving it for publication was Turgay Celik . at present due to privacy, technical, and legal issues. Security
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
27462 For more information, see [Link] VOLUME 11, 2023
Y. Nguyen Tan et al.: Transfer Learning Approach to Breast Cancer Classification in a FL Framework

and privacy techniques enable stricter protection of patient an international group of hospitals and medical imag-
data and the use of data for research and routine clinical ing centers have joined this collaborative effort to train
purposes [3], [4]. the model in a completely decentralized manner, with no
A study on breast mass classification from mammograms data sharing between hospitals. This places higher require-
using convolutional neural networks (CNN) was published ments on the robustness of algorithms and the selection of
in 2016 [5], where the authors gave results with recall for hyperparameters.
identifying lesions estimated to be between 0.75 and 0.92, The fourth challenge concerned the distributed learning
which means that up to 25% of abnormalities could remain ability of the FL models [14], [15] employed. Many dis-
undetected. Therefore, the ability to automatically detect tributed learning models are used in FL for different appli-
lesions and predict their likelihood of malignancy would be cations. However, most studies focus on hypothetical data,
valuable for doctors and could dramatically improve survival and each model is only suitable for one dataset, which makes
rates. Thus, we developed an FL base to extract features it difficult for researchers with practical applications as in
from multiple participating environments rather than a cen- breast cancer. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models,
tralized learning environment. To investigate the real-world we tested the evaluation by other methods for comparison.
performance of FL, we conducted a study for the applied The contributions of this paper are as follows:
development of numerous breast cancer classification models • Design of an FL framework for breast cancer classifica-
using mammography data. An international group of hos- tion that includes a global server, which acts as a weight
pitals and medical imaging centers joined this collaborative aggregator and mobile replacement edge clients in tissue
effort to train models in a completely decentralized fash- training deep learning (DL). This solution is useful for
ion, without any data sharing between hospitals. This placed AI healthcare applications and can be widely deployed
higher requirements on the robustness of algorithms and the in different hospitals or clinics.
selection of hyperparameters. In our study, we believed that • Pioneering use of a transfer learning pre-training dataset
the analysis of recall performance was more important than in FL for breast cancer classification. Various models in
accuracy as false negatives can be life-threatening and false transfer learning were selected for performance evalu-
positives are likely to be viewed by humans in diagnosing ation, including k-nearest neighbors (kNN), AdaBoost,
breast cancer, and that is the main objective of this study. and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB). First, the
Recently, FL has become a novel research trend in AI image’s features are extracted using the Convolutional
applications. It aims to train a machine learning (ML) algo- Neural Network (ConvNet) of the pre-trained model,
rithm across multiple decentralized nodes while holding the and a linear classifier is used to classify the images.
data samples (i.e., without locally exchanging them) [6]. Next, we used data equalization techniques such as
Training such a decentralized model in an FL setup presented SMOTE and data augmentation in combination with
four main challenges: (i) system and data heterogeneity, ImageNet to enrich and further optimize the training
(ii) pre-trained data processing, (iii) data protection and pri- data.
vacy, and (iv) efficiency selection of distributed ML algo- • With both balanced and imbalanced methods, experi-
rithms. We addressed these challenges for breast cancer mental results from the Digital Database for Screening
classification in the context of FL. Mammography (DDSM) dataset demonstrate that our
The first challenge was system and data heterogeneity. solution’s FeAvg-CNN + MobileNet is much better for
Different system vendors produce images with considerably centralized learning, which is more than 5% recall [5] in
different intensity profiles for the same imaging modality. improved performance. Moreover, the accuracy of our
To address this diversity, many recent studies have found research results reached nearly 98%; by comparison, the
that a data-balancing solution such as the unsupervised maximum results were only 88.67% for the two-class
domain adaptation method forces the model to learn solution cases (calcifications and masses) and 94.92% (benign
domain-agnostic features through adversarial learning [7] or mass vs. malignant mass and benign calcification vs.
a specific type of batch normalization [8]. However, more malignant calcification) in the study [6].
straightforward methods were used in the current study to
address this challenge; we present a solution more efficiently The rest of this study is organized as follows. Section II
balances data. discusses related works; Section III describes the background
The second challenge is imperative to process the data study, and proposes together with some challenges and under-
before training because of its heterogeneity. There are many lying ideas. Section IV presents an experimental evaluation of
data processing methods [9], [10]. We chose transfer learning the deployed components. Finally, Section V discusses, and
due to its many benefits, such as saving training time, better Section VI concludes the future work.
neural network performance (in most cases), and the fact that
large amounts of data are not needed [11]. II. RELATED WORKS
To address the third challenge, data protection and pri- A. DEEP LEARNING
vacy [12], [13], many studies have incorporated more Today, breast cancer research mainly focuses on detecting and
security and privacy solutions. Our solution assumes that diagnosing breast tumors using deep learning algorithms [3],

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Y. Nguyen Tan et al.: Transfer Learning Approach to Breast Cancer Classification in a FL Framework

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