Adversarial Attack and Defense in Breast Cancer Deep Learning Systems

Deep-learning-assisted medical diagnosis has brought revolutionary innovations to medicine. Breast cancer is a great threat to women’s health, and deep-learning-assisted diagnosis of breast cancer pathology images can save manpower and improve diagnostic accuracy. However, researchers have found that deep learning systems based on natural images are vulnerable to attacks that can lead to errors in recognition and classification, raising security concerns about deep systems based on medical images. We used the adversarial attack algorithm FGSM to reveal that breast cancer deep learning systems are vulnerable to attacks and thus misclassify breast cancer pathology images. To address this problem, we built a deep learning system for breast cancer pathology image recognition with better defense performance. Accurate diagnosis of medical images is related to the health status of patients. Therefore, it is very important and meaningful to improve the security and reliability of medical deep learning systems before they are actually deployed.