Looking for abnormalities using asymmetrical information from bilateral mammograms

XIN WANG, Yuan Gao, Tianyu Zhang, Luyi Han, Regina Beets-Tan, Ritse Mann

Keywords: Bilateral mammogram, asymmetry attention, breast cancer

Abstract: Radiologists commonly compare the bilateral mammograms to detect asymmetric abnormalities. While fibroglandular tissue is normally quite symmetrically distributed, lesions in one breast and will only rarely have a counterpart in the corresponding area of the opposite breast. Motivated by this experience, we explore a model that can learn to detect asymmetrical information from bilateral mammograms and then find the abnormal areas, similar to what a radiologist does. This can increase model performance and interpretability. We evaluate the proposed methods on the popular INBreast dataset and show improved performance in abnormal classification and weakly supervised segmentation tasks.

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Paper Type: novel methodological ideas without extensive validation

Primary Subject Area: Detection and Diagnosis

Secondary Subject Area: Application: Radiology

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