Multi-Task Fusion for Improving Mammography Screening Data Classification

A multi-task fusion model based on a residual-Multi-layer perceptron network for mammographic breast cancer screening

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Deep learning approaches are being increasingly applied for medical computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). However, these methods generally target only specific image-processing tasks, such as lesion segmentation or benign state prediction. For the breast cancer screening task, single feature extraction models are generally used, which directly extract only those potential features from the input mammogram that are relevant to the target task. This can lead to the neglect of other important morphological features of the lesion as well as other auxiliary information from the internal breast tissue. To obtain more comprehensive and objective diagnostic results, in this study, we developed a multi-task fusion model that combines multiple specific tasks for CAD of mammograms.

METHODS

We first trained a set of separate, task-specific models, including a density classification model, a mass segmentation model, and a lesion benignity-malignancy classification model, and then developed a multi-task fusion model that incorporates all of the mammographic features from these different tasks to yield comprehensive and refined prediction results for breast cancer diagnosis.

RESULTS

The experimental results showed that our proposed multi-task fusion model outperformed other related state-of-the-art models in both breast cancer screening tasks in the publicly available datasets CBIS-DDSM and INbreast, achieving a competitive screening performance with area-under-the-curve scores of 0.92 and 0.95, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

Our model not only allows an overall assessment of lesion types in mammography but also provides intermediate results related to radiological features and potential cancer risk factors, indicating its potential to offer comprehensive workflow support to radiologists.

Integrative approach for classifying male tumors based on DNA methylation 450K data

Malignancies such as bladder urothelial carcinoma, colon adenocarcinoma, liver hepatocellular carcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma and prostate adenocarcinoma significantly impact men's well-being. Accurate cancer classification is vital in determining treatment strategies and improving patient prognosis. This study introduced an innovative method that utilizes gene selection from high-dimensional datasets to enhance the performance of the male tumor classification algorithm. The method assesses the reliability of DNA methylation data to distinguish the five most prevalent types of male cancers from normal tissues by employing DNA methylation 450K data obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. First, the chi-square test is used for dimensionality reduction and second, L1 penalized logistic regression is used for feature selection. Furthermore, the stacking ensemble learning technique was employed to integrate seven common multiclassification models. Experimental results demonstrated that the ensemble learning model utilizing multiple classification models outperformed any base classification model. The proposed ensemble model achieved an astonishing overall accuracy (ACC) of 99.2% in independent testing data. Moreover, it may present novel ideas and pathways for the early detection and treatment of future diseases.

A Hybrid Deep Transfer Learning of CNN-Based LR-PCA for Breast Lesion Diagnosis via Medical Breast Mammograms

One of the most promising research areas in the healthcare industry and the scientific community is focusing on the AI-based applications for real medical challenges such as the building of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast cancer. Transfer learning is one of the recent emerging AI-based techniques that allow rapid learning progress and improve medical imaging diagnosis performance. Although deep learning classification for breast cancer has been widely covered, certain obstacles still remain to investigate the independency among the extracted high-level deep features. This work tackles two challenges that still exist when designing effective CAD systems for breast lesion classification from mammograms. The first challenge is to enrich the input information of the deep learning models by generating pseudo-colored images instead of only using the input original grayscale images. To achieve this goal two different image preprocessing techniques are parallel used: contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and Pixel-wise intensity adjustment. The original image is preserved in the first channel, while the other two channels receive the processed images, respectively. The generated three-channel pseudo-colored images are fed directly into the input layer of the backbone CNNs to generate more powerful high-level deep features. The second challenge is to overcome the multicollinearity problem that occurs among the high correlated deep features generated from deep learning models. A new hybrid processing technique based on Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is presented and called LR-PCA. Such a process helps to select the significant principal components (PCs) to further use them for the classification purpose. The proposed CAD system has been examined using two different public benchmark datasets which are INbreast and mini-MAIS. The proposed CAD system could achieve the highest performance accuracies of 98.60% and 98.80% using INbreast and mini-MAIS datasets, respectively. Such a CAD system seems to be useful and reliable for breast cancer diagnosis.