SANAS-Net: spatial attention neural architecture search for breast cancer detection

Abstract

The utilization of mammography images plays a vital role in the prompt detection and treatment of breast cancer. Breast imaging techniques aid medical professionals in assessing the dimensions, morphology, and spatial orientation of breast lesions, facilitating the differentiation between benign and malignant conditions. Breast tissue can vary widely in terms of density, composition, and structure, leading to complexities in distinguishing between benign and malignant conditions. The primary contribution of this paper is the proposal of a spatial attention-based neural architecture search network (SANAS-Net) technique that incorporates a spatial attention mechanism, enabling the model to learn and prioritize key regions within mammograms (MMs). Multi-head attention is employed within the transformer blocks to effectively capture a wide range of spatial relations and feature interactions. Global contextual information was integrated into the transformer blocks by means of introducing positional embeddings. Several practical studies have been undertaken to verify the effectiveness of our methodology in identifying fully attentive networks that exhibit good performance in distinguishing between malignant and benign breast cancer cases. The experimental study reached a test accuracy of 89.95%, which is way higher than previously proposed algorithms for mammography imagebased breast cancer detection.