Self-supervised learning of mammograms with pathology aware

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

Keywords: self-supervised learning, dense breast, pathology aware, CAD

Abstract: Screening mammography is recognized as an effective method to diagnose breast cancer (BC). However, for extremely dense breasts, there is a higher chance to induce misdiagnosing. To suppress misdiagnosis from radiologists in mammography reading, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) based on imaging has been widely researched and applied. These CAD tools increasingly have deeper layers design aiming for better performance, but this may decrease robustness particularly in dense breast. Therefore, to benefit BC identification in the context of supervision from rare annotated datasets, we propose a self-supervised learning framework to normalize mammograms into pathology aware (PA) style, which is in line with the pathological local enhancement characteristic, and prove the value of PA mammogram for the downstream tasks. Experimental results on INBreast and CBIS-DDSM datasets suggest that our method can achieve better performance in both normal and dense breasts for classification and 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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