Neural network-based diagnostic and prognostic estimations in breast cancer microscopic instances

This paper deals with breast cancer diagnostic and prognostic estimations employing neural networks over the Wisconsin Breast Cancer datasets, which consist of measurements taken from breast cancer microscopic instances. A probabilistic approach is dedicated to solve the diagnosis problem, detecting malignancy among instances derived from the Fine Needle Aspirate test, while regression algorithms estimate the time interval that possibly correspond to the right end-point of the patients’ disease-free survival time or the time where the tumour recurs (time-to-recur). For the diagnosis problem, the accuracy of the neural network in terms of sensitivity and specificity was measured at 98.6 and 97.5% respectively, using the leave-one-out test method. As far as the prognosis problem is concerned, the accuracy of the neural network was measured through a stratified tenfold cross-validation approach. Sensitivity ranged between 80.5 and 91.8%, while specificity ranged between 91.9 and 97.9%, depending on the tested fold and the partition of the predicted period. The prognostic recurrence predictions were then further evaluated using survival analysis and compared with other techniques found in literature.