Proceedings Article | 13 March 2017
KEYWORDS: Breast cancer, Dielectric spectroscopy, Computing systems, Sensors, Imaging informatics, Mechanical engineering, Control systems design, Control systems, Nipple, Breast, Tumors, Feature extraction, Biopsy, Evolutionary algorithms
This study developed and tested a multi-probe resonance-frequency-based electrical impedance spectroscopy (REIS) system aimed at detection of breast cancer. The REIS system consists of specially designed mechanical supporting device that can be easily lifted to fit women of different height, a seven probe sensor cup, and a computer providing software for system control and management. The sensor cup includes one central probe for direct contact with the nipple, and other six probes uniformly distributed at a distance of 35mm away from the center probe to enable contact with breast skin surface. It takes about 18 seconds for this system to complete a data acquisition process. We utilized this system for examination of breast cancer, collecting a dataset of 289 cases including biopsy verified 74 malignant and 215 benign tumors. After that, 23 REIS based features, including seven frequency, fifteen magnitude features were extracted, and an age feature. To reduce redundancy we selected 6 features using the evolutionary algorithm for classification. The area under a receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was computed to assess classifier performance. A multivariable logistic regression method was performed for detection of the tumors. The results of our study showed for the 23 REIS features AUC and ACC, Sensitivity and Specificity of 0.796, 0.727, 0.731 and 0.726, respectively. The AUC and ACC, Sensitivity and Specificity for the 6 REIS features of 0.840, 0.80, 0.703 and 0.833, respectively, and AUC of 0.662 and 0.619 for the frequency and magnitude based REIS features, respectively. The performance of the classifiers using all the 6 features was significantly better than solely using magnitude features (p=3.29e-08) and frequency features (5.61e-07). Smote algorithm was used to expand small samples to balance the dataset, the AUC after data balance of 0.846，increased than the original data classification performance. The results indicated that the REIS system is a promising tool for detection of breast cancer and may be acceptable for clinical implementation.
