DGANet: A Dual Global Attention Neural Network for Breast Lesion Detection in Ultrasound Images

Abstract

Deep learning-based breast lesion detection in ultrasound images has demonstrated great potential to provide objective suggestions for radiologists and improve their accuracy in diagnosing breast diseases. However, the lack of an effective feature enhancement approach limits the performance of deep learning models. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel dual global attention neural network (DGANet) to improve the accuracy of breast lesion detection in ultrasound images. Specifically, we designed a bilateral spatial attention module and a global channel attention module to enhance features in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. The bilateral spatial attention module enhances features by capturing supporting information in regions neighboring breast lesions and reducing integration of noise signal. The global channel attention module enhances features of important channels by weighted calculation, where the weights are decided by the learned interdependencies among all channels. To verify the performance of the DGANet, we conduct breast lesion detection experiments on our collected data set of 7040 ultrasound images and a public data set of breast ultrasound images. YOLOv3, RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, and YOLOX are used as comparison models. The results indicate that DGANet outperforms the comparison methods by 0.2%-5.9% in total mean average precision.

Keywords: Attention mechanism; Breast cancer; Deep learning; Lesion detection; Ultrasound image.