Abstract:
: Breast mass identification is a crucial procedure during mammogram-based early breast
cancer diagnosis. However, it is difficult to determine whether a breast lump is benign or cancerous at
early stages. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used to solve this problem and have
provided useful advancements. However, CNNs focus only on a certain portion of the mammogram
while ignoring the remaining and present computational complexity because of multiple convolutions.
Recently, vision transformers have been developed as a technique to overcome such limitations of
CNNs, ensuring better or comparable performance in natural image classification. However, the
utility of this technique has not been thoroughly investigated in the medical image domain. In this
study, we developed a transfer learning technique based on vision transformers to classify breast
mass mammograms. The area under the receiver operating curve of the new model was estimated as
1 ± 0, thus outperforming the CNN-based transfer-learning models and vision transformer models
trained from scratch. The technique can, hence, be applied in a clinical setting, to improve the early
diagnosis of breast cancer