Convolutional Neural Networks for Breast Cancer Screening: Transfer Learning with Exponential Decay

In this paper, we propose a Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) system based on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, to build an end-to-end learning process that classifies breast mass lesions. We investigate the impact that has transfer learning when large data is scarce, and explore the proper way to fine-tune the layers to learn features that are more specific to the new data. The proposed approach showed better performance compared to other proposals that classified the same dataset.