Breast Density Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Nan Wu, Krzysztof J. Geras, Yiqiu Shen, Jingyi Su, S. Gene Kim, Eric Kim, Stacey Wolfson, Linda Moy, Kyunghyun Cho

Abstract: Breast density classification is an essential part of breast cancer screening. Although a lot of prior work considered this problem as a task for learning algorithms, to our knowledge, all of them used small and not clinically realistic data both for training and evaluation of their models. In this work, we explored the limits of this task with a data set coming from over 200,000 breast cancer screening exams. We used this data to train and evaluate a strong convolutional neural network classifier. In a reader study, we found that our model can perform this task comparably to a human expert.