Multi-contrast learning-guided lightweight few-shot learning scheme for predicting breast cancer molecular subtypes

Med Biol Eng Comput. 2024 May;62(5):1601-1613. doi: 10.1007/s11517-024-03031-0. Epub 2024 Feb 6.

Abstract

Invasive gene expression profiling studies have exposed prognostically significant breast cancer subtypes: normal-like, luminal, HER-2 enriched, and basal-like, which is defined in large part by human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2), progesterone receptor (PR), and estrogen receptor (ER). However, while dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) has been generally employed in the screening and therapy of breast cancer, there is a challenging problem to noninvasively predict breast cancer molecular subtypes, which have extremely low-data regimes. In this paper, a novel few-shot learning scheme, which combines lightweight contrastive convolutional neural network (LC-CNN) and multi-contrast learning strategy (MCLS), is worthwhile to be developed for predicting molecular subtype of breast cancer in DCE-MRI. Moreover, MCLS is designed to construct One-vs-Rest and One-vs-One classification tasks, which addresses inter-class similarity among normal-like, luminal, HER-2 enriched, and basal-like. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme over state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our scheme is able to achieve competitive results on few samples due to joint LC-CNN and MCLS for excavating contrastive correlations of a pair of DCE-MRI.

Keywords: Breast cancer; Few-shot learning; One-vs-One; One-vs-Rest.

MeSH terms

  • Breast Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Breast Neoplasms* / genetics
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
  • Receptors, Estrogen* / genetics
  • Receptors, Estrogen* / metabolism

Substances

  • Receptors, Estrogen