Deep Neural Networks With Region-Based Pooling Structures for Mammographic Image Classification

Comparison of segmentation-free and segmentation-dependent computer-aided diagnosis of breast masses on a public mammography dataset

PURPOSE

To compare machine learning methods for classifying mass lesions on mammography images that use predefined image features computed over lesion segmentations to those that leverage segmentation-free representation learning on a standard, public evaluation dataset.

METHODS

We apply several classification algorithms to the public Curated Breast Imaging Subset of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM), in which each image contains a mass lesion. Segmentation-free representation learning techniques for classifying lesions as benign or malignant include both a Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) method and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We compare classification performance of these techniques to that obtained using two different segmentation-dependent approaches from the literature that rely on specific combinations of end classifiers (e.g. linear discriminant analysis, neural networks) and predefined features computed over the lesion segmentation (e.g. spiculation measure, morphological characteristics, intensity metrics).

RESULTS

We report area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AZ) values for malignancy classification on CBIS-DDSM for each technique. We find average AZ values of 0.73 for a segmentation-free BoVW method, 0.86 for a segmentation-free CNN method, 0.75 for a segmentation-dependent linear discriminant analysis of Rubber-Band Straightening Transform features, and 0.58 for a hybrid rule-based neural network classification using a small number of hand-designed features.

CONCLUSIONS

We find that malignancy classification performance on the CBIS-DDSM dataset using segmentation-free BoVW features is comparable to that of the best segmentation-dependent methods we study, but also observe that a common segmentation-free CNN model substantially and significantly outperforms each of these (p < 0.05). These results reinforce recent findings suggesting that representation learning techniques such as BoVW and CNNs are advantageous for mammogram analysis because they do not require lesion segmentation, the quality and specific characteristics of which can vary substantially across datasets. We further observe that segmentation-dependent methods achieve performance levels on CBIS-DDSM inferior to those achieved on the original evaluation datasets reported in the literature. Each of these findings reinforces the need for standardization of datasets, segmentation techniques, and model implementations in performance assessments of automated classifiers for medical imaging.

New convolutional neural network model for screening and diagnosis of mammograms

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and poses a great threat to women's life and health. Mammography is an effective method for the diagnosis of breast cancer, but the results are largely limited by the clinical experience of radiologists. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to perform two-stage classification (Normal/Abnormal and Benign/Malignancy) of two- view mammograms through convolutional neural network. In this study, we constructed a multi-view feature fusion network model for classification of mammograms from two views, and we proposed a multi-scale attention DenseNet as the backbone network for feature extraction. The model consists of two independent branches, which are used to extract the features of two mammograms from different views. Our work mainly focuses on the construction of multi-scale convolution module and attention module. The final experimental results show that the model has achieved good performance in both classification tasks. We used the DDSM database to evaluate the proposed method. The accuracy, sensitivity and AUC values of normal and abnormal mammograms classification were 94.92%, 96.52% and 94.72%, respectively. And the accuracy, sensitivity and AUC values of benign and malignant mammograms classification were 95.24%, 96.11% and 95.03%, respectively.