Bio101 breast cancer learning team project essay

This is a project that relied on volunteers to classify images of breast cancer tumours. The images themselves contained a mixture of different looking cells. Despite having over 2,000,000 contributions, the project struggled to differentiate cancer cells from non-cancer cells.

The class CancerNet has a static method build that takes four parameters- width and height of the image, its depth (the number of color channels in each image), and the number of classes the network will predict between, which, for us, is 2 (0 and 1). In this method, we initialize model and shape.

In this project in python, we’ll build a classifier to train on 80% of a breast cancer histology image dataset. Of this, we’ll keep 10% of the data for validation. Using Keras, we’ll define a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), call it CancerNet, and train it on our images.

We created machine learning models using only the Gail model inputs and models using both Gail model inputs and additional personal health data relevant to breast cancer risk. For both sets of inputs, six machine learning models were trained and evaluated on the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial data set.