Hybrid Neurocomputing for Breast Cancer Detection

Breast cancer is one of the major tumor related cause of death in women. Various artificial intelligence techniques have been used to improve the diagnoses procedures and to aid the physician’s efforts. In this paper we summarize our preliminary study to detect breast cancer using a Flexible Neural Tree (FNT), Neural Network (NN), Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) and their ensemble combination. For the FNT model, a tree-structure based evolutionary algorithm and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are used to find an optimal FNT. For the NN and WNN, the PSO is employed to optimize the free parameters. The performance of each approach is evaluated using the breast cancer data set. Simulation results show that the obtained FNT model has a fewer number of variables with reduced number of input features and without significant reduction in the detection accuracy. The overall accuracy could be improved by using an ensemble approach by a voting method.