Ipsilateral Lesion Detection Refinement for Tomosynthesis

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2023 Oct;42(10):3080-3090. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2023.3280135. Epub 2023 Oct 2.

Abstract

Computer-aided detection (CAD) frameworks for breast cancer screening have been researched for several decades. Early adoption of deep-learning models in CAD frameworks has shown greatly improved detection performance compared to traditional CAD on single-view images. Recently, studies have improved performance by merging information from multiple views within each screening exam. Clinically, the integration of lesion correspondence during screening is a complicated decision process that depends on the correct execution of several referencing steps. However, most multi-view CAD frameworks are deep-learning-based black-box techniques. Fully end-to-end designs make it very difficult to analyze model behaviors and fine-tune performance. More importantly, the black-box nature of the techniques discourages clinical adoption due to the lack of explicit reasoning for each multi-view referencing step. Therefore, there is a need for a multi-view detection framework that can not only detect cancers accurately but also provide step-by-step, multi-view reasoning. In this work, we present Ipsilateral-Matching-Refinement Networks (IMR-Net) for digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) lesion detection across multiple views. Our proposed framework adaptively refines the single-view detection scores based on explicit ipsilateral lesion matching. IMR-Net is built on a robust, single-view detection CAD pipeline with a commercial development DBT dataset of 24675 DBT volumetric views from 8034 exams. Performance is measured using location-based, case-level receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and case-level free-response ROC (FROC) analysis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Breast Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Breast Neoplasms* / pathology
  • Early Detection of Cancer
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Mammography / methods
  • ROC Curve
  • Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods