Towards automated segmentation and classification of masses in mammograms

Breast Cancer Segmentation Methods: Current Status and Future Potentials

Early breast cancer detection is one of the most important issues that need to be addressed worldwide as it can help increase the survival rate of patients. Mammograms have been used to detect breast cancer in the early stages; if detected in the early stages, it can drastically reduce treatment costs. The detection of tumours in the breast depends on segmentation techniques. Segmentation plays a significant role in image analysis and includes detection, feature extraction, classification, and treatment. Segmentation helps physicians quantify the volume of tissue in the breast for treatment planning. In this work, we have grouped segmentation methods into three groups: classical segmentation that includes region-, threshold-, and edge-based segmentation; machine learning segmentation; and supervised and unsupervised and deep learning segmentation. The findings of our study revealed that region-based segmentation is frequently used for classical methods, and the most frequently used techniques are region growing. Further, a median filter is a robust tool for removing noise. Moreover, the MIAS database is frequently used in classical segmentation methods. Meanwhile, in machine learning segmentation, unsupervised machine learning methods are more frequently used, and U-Net is frequently used for mammogram image segmentation because it does not require many annotated images compared with other deep learning models. Furthermore, reviewed papers revealed that it is possible to train a deep learning model without performing any preprocessing or postprocessing and also showed that the U-Net model is frequently used for mammogram segmentation. The U-Net model is frequently used because it does not require many annotated images and also because of the presence of high-performance GPU computing, which makes it easy to train networks with more layers. Additionally, we identified mammograms and utilised widely used databases, wherein 3 and 28 are public and private databases, respectively.

AUNet: attention-guided dense-upsampling networks for breast mass segmentation in whole mammograms

Mammography is one of the most commonly applied tools for early breast cancer screening. Automatic segmentation of breast masses in mammograms is essential but challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and the wide variety of mass shapes and sizes. Existing methods deal with these challenges mainly by extracting mass-centered image patches manually or automatically. However, manual patch extraction is time-consuming and automatic patch extraction brings errors that could not be compensated in the following segmentation step. In this study, we propose a novel attention-guided dense-upsampling network (AUNet) for accurate breast mass segmentation in whole mammograms directly. In AUNet, we employ an asymmetrical encoder-decoder structure and propose an effective upsampling block, attention-guided dense-upsampling block (AU block). Especially, the AU block is designed to have three merits. Firstly, it compensates the information loss of bilinear upsampling by dense upsampling. Secondly, it designs a more effective method to fuse high- and low-level features. Thirdly, it includes a channel-attention function to highlight rich-information channels. We evaluated the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, CBIS-DDSM and INbreast. Compared to three state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks, AUNet achieved the best performances with an average Dice similarity coefficient of 81.8% for CBIS-DDSM and 79.1% for INbreast.

Level set-based core segmentation of mammographic masses facilitating three stage (core, periphery, spiculation) analysis

We present mammographic mass core segmentation, based on the Chan-Vese level set method. The proposed method is analyzed via resulting feature efficacies. Additionally, the core segmentation method is used to investigate the idea of a three stage segmentation approach, i.e. segment the mass core, periphery, and spiculations (if any exist) and use features from these three segmentations to classify the mass as either benign or malignant. The proposed core segmentation method and a proposed end-to-end computer aided detection (CAD) system using a three stage segmentation are implemented and experimentally tested with a set of 60 mammographic images from the Digital Database of Screening Mammography. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve A<inf>Z</inf> values for morphological and texture features extracted from the core segmentation are shown to be on par, or better, than those extracted from a periphery segmentation. The efficacy of the core segmentation features when combined with the periphery and spiculation segmentation features are shown to be feature set dependent. The proposed end-to-end system uses stepwise linear discriminant analysis for feature selection and a maximum likelihood classifier. Using all three stages (core + periphery + spiculations) results in an overall accuracy (OA) of 90% with 2 false negatives (FN). Since many CAD systems only perform a periphery analysis, adding core features could be a benefit to potentially increase OA and reduce FN cases.