Consistent Learning-Based Breast Tumor Segmentation and Its Application in Sentinel Lymph Node Metastasis Prediction

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2023 Jul:2023:1-4. doi: 10.1109/EMBC40787.2023.10340091.

Abstract

Accurate staging of lymph nodes provides crucial diagnostic information for breast cancer patients, where segmentation is of great importance by localizing and visualizing the breast tumor of interest. Nevertheless, current segmentation methods perform average when facing large span of tumor sizes, degraded image quality, blurred tumor boundaries, and resulting noise during manual annotation. Therefore, we develop a Multi-scale RepVGG-based Segmentation Network (MPSegNet) to segment breast tumor from MR images. In particular, we construct a consistent learning framework for the MPSegNet to alleviate the impact of noisy labels upon segmentation results. The rationale is that different views covering the same breast tumors are supposed to generate identical segmentation predictions. Then, we predict SLN metastasis given segmented breast tumors, where we evaluate the relationships between the predictive performance and tumor segmentations under different consistencies. The results show the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art methods. A high consistency among multiple views can boost the segmentation performance during consistent learning. However, the optimal segmentation does not produce the best SLN metastatic prediction results, implying that the dependence of classification upon segmentation needs to be elaborately investigated further.Clinical Relevance- This study facilitates more accurate segmentation of breast tumors with consistent learning, and provides an initial analysis between tumor segmentation and subsequent prediction of SLN metastasis, which has potential significance for the precise medical care of breast cancer patients.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Breast Neoplasms* / pathology
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Lymph Nodes / pathology
  • Lymphatic Metastasis
  • Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy* / methods