Breast cancer diagnosis using abnormalities on ipsilateral views of digital mammograms

MDF-Net: A Multi-Scale Dynamic Fusion Network for Breast Tumor Segmentation of Ultrasound Images

Breast tumor segmentation of ultrasound images provides valuable information of tumors for early detection and diagnosis. Accurate segmentation is challenging due to low image contrast between areas of interest; speckle noises, and large inter-subject variations in tumor shape and size. This paper proposes a novel Multi-scale Dynamic Fusion Network (MDF-Net) for breast ultrasound tumor segmentation. It employs a two-stage end-to-end architecture with a trunk sub-network for multiscale feature selection and a structurally optimized refinement sub-network for mitigating impairments such as noise and inter-subject variation via better feature exploration and fusion. The trunk network is extended from UNet++ with a simplified skip pathway structure to connect the features between adjacent scales. Moreover, deep supervision at all scales, instead of at the finest scale in UNet++, is proposed to extract more discriminative features and mitigate errors from speckle noise via a hybrid loss function. Unlike previous works, the first stage is linked to a loss function of the second stage so that both the preliminary segmentations and refinement subnetworks can be refined together at training. The refinement sub-network utilizes a structurally optimized MDF mechanism to integrate preliminary segmentation information (capturing general tumor shape and size) at coarse scales and explores inter-subject variation information at finer scales. Experimental results from two public datasets show that the proposed method achieves better Dice and other scores over state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative analysis also indicates that our proposed network is more robust to tumor size/shapes, speckle noise and heavy posterior shadows along tumor boundaries. An optional post-processing step is also proposed to facilitate users in mitigating segmentation artifacts. The efficiency of the proposed network is also illustrated on the "Electron Microscopy neural structures segmentation dataset". It outperforms a state-of-the-art algorithm based on UNet-2022 with simpler settings. This indicates the advantages of our MDF-Nets in other challenging image segmentation tasks with small to medium data sizes.

Multisystem Imaging Recommendations/Guidelines: In the Pursuit of Precision Oncology

With an increasing rate of cancers in almost all age groups and advanced screening techniques leading to an early diagnosis and longer longevity of patients with cancers, it is of utmost importance that radiologists assigned with cancer imaging should be prepared to deal with specific expected and unexpected circumstances that may arise during the lifetime of these patients. Tailored integration of preventive and curative interventions with current health plans and global escalation of efforts for timely diagnosis of cancers will pave the path for a cancer-free world. The commonly encountered circumstances in the current era, complicating cancer imaging, include coronavirus disease 2019 infection, pregnancy and lactation, immunocompromised states, bone marrow transplant, and screening of cancers in the relevant population. In this article, we discuss the imaging recommendations pertaining to cancer screening and diagnosis in the aforementioned clinical circumstances.

Diagnostic Strategies for Breast Cancer Detection: From Image Generation to Classification Strategies Using Artificial Intelligence Algorithms

Breast cancer is one the main death causes for women worldwide, as 16% of the diagnosed malignant lesions worldwide are its consequence. In this sense, it is of paramount importance to diagnose these lesions in the earliest stage possible, in order to have the highest chances of survival. While there are several works that present selected topics in this area, none of them present a complete panorama, that is, from the image generation to its interpretation. This work presents a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the image generation and processing techniques to detect Breast Cancer, where potential candidates for the image generation and processing are presented and discussed. Novel methodologies should consider the adroit integration of artificial intelligence-concepts and the categorical data to generate modern alternatives that can have the accuracy, precision and reliability expected to mitigate the misclassifications.

Multichannel DenseNet Architecture for Classification of Mammographic Breast Density for Breast Cancer Detection

Percentage mammographic breast density (MBD) is one of the most notable biomarkers. It is assessed visually with the support of radiologists with the four qualitative Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BIRADS) categories. It is demanding for radiologists to differentiate between the two variably allocated BIRADS classes, namely, “BIRADS C and BIRADS D.” Recently, convolution neural networks have been found superior in classification tasks due to their ability to extract local features with shared weight architecture and space invariance characteristics. The proposed study intends to examine an artificial intelligence (AI)-based MBD classifier toward developing a latent computer-assisted tool for radiologists to distinguish the BIRADS class in modern clinical progress. This article proposes a multichannel DenseNet architecture for MBD classification. The proposed architecture consists of four-channel DenseNet transfer learning architecture to extract significant features from a single patient's two a mediolateral oblique (MLO) and two craniocaudal (CC) views of digital mammograms. The performance of the proposed classifier is evaluated using 200 cases consisting of 800 digital mammograms of the different BIRADS density classes with validated density ground truth. The classifier's performance is assessed with quantitative metrics such as precision, responsiveness, specificity, and the area under the curve (AUC). The concluding preliminary outcomes reveal that this intended multichannel model has delivered good performance with an accuracy of 96.67% during training and 90.06% during testing and an average AUC of 0.9625. Obtained results are also validated qualitatively with the help of a radiologist expert in the field of MBD. Proposed architecture achieved state-of-the-art results with a fewer number of images and with less computation power.

Segmentation of Breast Masses in Mammogram Image Using Multilevel Multiobjective Electromagnetism-Like Optimization Algorithm

In recent times, breast mass is the most diagnostic sign for early detection of breast cancer, where the precise segmentation of masses is important to reduce the mortality rate. This research proposes a new multiobjective optimization technique for segmenting the breast masses from the mammographic image. The proposed model includes three phases such as image collection, image denoising, and segmentation. Initially, the mammographic images are collected from two benchmark datasets like Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) and Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS). Next, image normalization and Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) techniques are employed for enhancing the visual capability and contrast of the mammographic images. After image denoising, electromagnetism-like (EML) optimization technique is used for segmenting the noncancer and cancer portions from the mammogram image. The proposed EML technique includes the advantages like enhanced robustness to hold the image details and adaptive to local context. Lastly, template matching is carried out after segmentation to detect the cancer regions, and then, the effectiveness of the proposed model is analysed in light of Jaccard coefficient, dice coefficient, specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy. Hence, the proposed model averagely achieved 92.3% of sensitivity, 99.21% of specificity, and 98.68% of accuracy on DDSM dataset, and the proposed model averagely achieved 92.11% of sensitivity, 99.45% of specificity, and 98.93% of accuracy on MIAS dataset.

Cross-modality image feature fusion diagnosis in breast cancer

Considering the complementarity of mammography and breast MRI, the research of feature fusion diagnosis based on cross-modality images was explored to improve the accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis. 201 patients with both mammography and breast MRI were collected retrospectively, including 117 cases of benign lesions and 84 cases of malignant ones. Two feature optimization strategies of sequential floating forward selection (SFFS), SFFS-1 and SFFS-2, were defined based on the sequential floating forward selection method. Each strategy was used to analyze the diagnostic performance of single-modality images and then to study the feature fusion diagnosis of cross-modality images. Three feature fusion approaches were compared: optimizing MRI features and then fusing those of mammography; optimizing mammography features and then fusing those of MRI; selecting the effective features from the whole feature set (mammography and MRI). Support vector machine, Naive Bayes, and K-nearest neighbor were employed as the classifiers and were finally integrated to get better performance. The average accuracy and area under the ROC curve (AUC) of MRI (88.56%, 0.9 for SFFS-1, 88.39%, 0.89 for SFFS-2) were better than mammography (84.25%, 0.84 for SFFS-1, 80.43%, 0.80 for SFFS-2). Furthermore, compared with a single modality, the average accuracy and AUC of cross-modality feature fusion can improve from 85.40% and 0.86 to 89.66% and 0.91. Classifier integration improved the accuracy and AUC from 90.49%, 0.92 to 92.37%, and 0.97. Cross-modality image feature fusion can achieve better diagnosis performance than a single modality. Feature selection strategy SFFS-1 has better efficiency than SFFS-2. Classifier integration can further improve diagnostic accuracy.