Evaluation of Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) in Screening Automated Breast Ultrasound Based on Characteristics of CAD Marks and False-Positive Marks

Expanding Horizons: The Realities of CAD, the Promise of Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning's Role in Breast Imaging beyond Screening Mammography

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mammography have gained significant popular attention; however, AI has the potential to revolutionize other aspects of breast imaging beyond simple lesion detection. AI has the potential to enhance risk assessment by combining conventional factors with imaging and improve lesion detection through a comparison with prior studies and considerations of symmetry. It also holds promise in ultrasound analysis and automated whole breast ultrasound, areas marked by unique challenges. AI's potential utility also extends to administrative tasks such as MQSA compliance, scheduling, and protocoling, which can reduce the radiologists' workload. However, adoption in breast imaging faces limitations in terms of data quality and standardization, generalizability, benchmarking performance, and integration into clinical workflows. Developing methods for radiologists to interpret AI decisions, and understanding patient perspectives to build trust in AI results, will be key future endeavors, with the ultimate aim of fostering more efficient radiology practices and better patient care.

A New Deep-Learning-Based Model for Breast Cancer Diagnosis from Medical Images

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers among women worldwide, and early detection of the disease can be lifesaving. Detecting breast cancer early allows for treatment to begin faster, increasing the chances of a successful outcome. Machine learning helps in the early detection of breast cancer even in places where there is no access to a specialist doctor. The rapid advancement of machine learning, and particularly deep learning, leads to an increase in the medical imaging community's interest in applying these techniques to improve the accuracy of cancer screening. Most of the data related to diseases is scarce. On the other hand, deep-learning models need much data to learn well. For this reason, the existing deep-learning models on medical images cannot work as well as other images. To overcome this limitation and improve breast cancer classification detection, inspired by two state-of-the-art deep networks, GoogLeNet and residual block, and developing several new features, this paper proposes a new deep model to classify breast cancer. Utilizing adopted granular computing, shortcut connection, two learnable activation functions instead of traditional activation functions, and an attention mechanism is expected to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and consequently decrease the load on doctors. Granular computing can improve diagnosis accuracy by capturing more detailed and fine-grained information about cancer images. The proposed model's superiority is demonstrated by comparing it to several state-of-the-art deep models and existing works using two case studies. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 93% and 95% on ultrasound images and breast histopathology images, respectively.

Ultrasound for Breast Cancer Screening in Resource-Limited Settings: Current Practice and Future Directions

Breast cancer (BC) is the most prevalent cancer among women globally. Cancer screening can reduce mortality and improve women’s health. In developed countries, mammography (MAM) has been primarily utilized for population-based BC screening for several decades. However, it is usually unavailable in low-resource settings due to the lack of equipment, personnel, and time necessary to conduct and interpret the examinations. Ultrasound (US) with high detection sensitivity for women of younger ages and with dense breasts has become a supplement to MAM for breast examination. Some guidelines suggest using US as the primary screening tool in certain settings where MAM is unavailable and infeasible, but global recommendations have not yet reached a unanimous consensus. With the development of smart devices and artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging, clinical applications and preclinical studies have shown the potential of US combined with AI in BC screening. Nevertheless, there are few comprehensive reviews focused on the role of US in screening BC in underserved conditions, especially in technological, economical, and global perspectives. This work presents the benefits, limitations, advances, and future directions of BC screening with technology-assisted and resource-appropriate strategies, which may be helpful to implement screening initiatives in resource-limited countries.

The Systematic Review of Artificial Intelligence Applications in Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Several studies have demonstrated the value of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in breast cancer diagnosis. The systematic review of AI applications in breast cancer diagnosis includes several studies that compare breast cancer diagnosis and AI. However, they lack systematization, and each study appears to be conducted uniquely. The purpose and contributions of this study are to offer elaborative knowledge on the applications of AI in the diagnosis of breast cancer through citation analysis in order to categorize the main area of specialization that attracts the attention of the academic community, as well as thematic issue analysis to identify the species being researched in each category. In this study, a total number of 17,900 studies addressing breast cancer and AI published between 2012 and 2022 were obtained from these databases: IEEE, Embase: Excerpta Medica Database Guide-Ovid, PubMed, Springer, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. We applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to the search; 36 studies were identified. The vast majority of AI applications used classification models for the prediction of breast cancer. Howbeit, accuracy (99%) has the highest number of performance metrics, followed by specificity (98%) and area under the curve (0.95). Additionally, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was the best model of choice in several studies. This study shows that the quantity and caliber of studies that use AI applications in breast cancer diagnosis will continue to rise annually. As a result, AI-based applications are viewed as a supplement to doctors' clinical reasoning, with the ultimate goal of providing quality healthcare that is both affordable and accessible to everyone worldwide.