Breast pectoral muscle segmentation in mammograms using a modified holistically-nested edge detection network

This paper presents a method for automatic breast pectoral muscle segmentation in mediolateral oblique mammograms using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) inspired by the Holistically-nested Edge Detection (HED) network. Most of the existing methods in the literature are based on hand-crafted models such as straight-line, curve-based techniques or a combination of both. Unfortunately, such models are insufficient when dealing with complex shape variations of the pectoral muscle boundary and when the boundary is unclear due to overlapping breast tissue. To compensate for these issues, we propose a neural network framework that incorporates multi-scale and multi-level learning, capable of learning complex hierarchical features to resolve spatial ambiguity in estimating the pectoral muscle boundary. For this purpose, we modified the HED network architecture to specifically find ‘contour-like’ objects in mammograms. The proposed framework produced a probability map that can be used to estimate the initial pectoral muscle boundary. Subsequently, we process these maps by extracting morphological properties to find the actual pectoral muscle boundary. Finally, we developed two different post-processing steps to find the actual pectoral muscle boundary. Quantitative evaluation results show that the proposed method is comparable with alternative state-of-the-art methods producing on average values of 94.8 ± 8.5% and 97.5 ± 6.3% for the Jaccard and Dice similarity metrics, respectively, across four different databases

PeMNet for Pectoral Muscle Segmentation

X.Y. holds a CSC scholarship with the University of Leicester. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. This paper is partially supported by Royal Society International Exchanges Cost Share Award, UK (RP202G0230); Medical Research Council Confidence in Concept Award, UK (MC_PC_17171); Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, UK (RM60G0680); Sino-UK Industrial Fund, UK (RP202G0289); Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), UK (P202PF11); British Heart Foundation Accelerator Award, UK (AA/18/3/34220); Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software (kx201901); MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa under the RTI2018-098913-B100 project, by the Consejeria de Economia, Innovacion, Ciencia y Empleo (Junta de Andalucia) and FEDER under CV20-45250, A-TIC-080-UGR18, B-TIC-586-UGR20 and P20-00525 projects.As an important imaging modality, mammography is considered to be the global gold standard for early detection of breast cancer. Computer-Aided (CAD) systems have played a crucial role in facilitating quicker diagnostic procedures, which otherwise could take weeks if only radiologists were involved. In some of these CAD systems, breast pectoral segmentation is required for breast region partition from breast pectoral muscle for specific analysis tasks. Therefore, accurate and efficient breast pectoral muscle segmentation frameworks are in high demand. Here, we proposed a novel deep learning framework, which we code-named PeMNet, for breast pectoral muscle segmentation in mammography images. In the proposed PeMNet, we integrated a novel attention module called the Global Channel Attention Module (GCAM), which can effectively improve the segmentation performance of Deeplabv3+ using minimal parameter overheads. In GCAM, channel attention maps (CAMs) are first extracted by concatenating feature maps after paralleled global average pooling and global maximum pooling operation. CAMs are then refined and scaled up by multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for elementwise multiplication with CAMs in next feature level. By iteratively repeating this procedure, the global CAMs (GCAMs) are then formed and multiplied elementwise with final feature maps to lead to final segmentation. By doing so, CAMs in early stages of a deep convolution network can be effectively passed on to later stages of the network and therefore leads to better information usage. The experiments on a merged dataset derived from two datasets, INbreast and OPTIMAM, showed that PeMNet greatly outperformed state-of-the-art methods by achieving an IoU of 97.46%, global pixel accuracy of 99.48%, Dice similarity coefficient of 96.30%, and Jaccard of 93.33%, respectively.CSCRoyal Society International Exchanges Cost Share Award, UK RP202G0230Medical Research Council Confidence in Concept Award, UK MC_PC_17171Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, UK RM60G0680Sino-UK Industrial Fund, UK RP202G0289Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), UK P202PF11British Heart Foundation Accelerator Award, UK AA/18/3/34220Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software kx201901FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa RTI2018-098913-B100Junta de AndaluciaEuropean Commission CV20-45250 A-TIC-080-UGR18 B-TIC-586-UGR20 P20-00525MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

An Image Processing Framework for Breast Cancer Detection Using Multi-View Mammographic Images

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in women. The early phase of breast cancer is asymptomatic, without any signs or symptoms. The earlier breast cancer can be detected, the greater chance of cure. Early detection using screening mammography is a common step for detecting the presence of breast cancer. Many studies of computer-based using breast cancer detection have been done previously. However, the detection process for craniocaudal (CC) view and mediolateral oblique (MLO) view angles were done separately. This study aims to improve the detection performance for breast cancer diagnosis with CC and MLO view analysis. An image processing framework for multi-view screening was used to improve the diagnostic results rather than single-view. Image enhancement, segmentation, and feature extraction are all part of the framework provided in this study. The stages of image quality improvement are very important because the contrast of mammographic images is relatively low, so it often overlaps between cancer tissue and normal tissue. Texture-based segmentation utilizing the first-order local entropy approach was used to segment the images. The value of the radius and the region of probable cancer were calculated using the findings of feature extraction. The results of this study show the accuracy of breast cancer detection using CC and MLO views were 88.0% and 80.5% respectively. The proposed framework was useful in the diagnosis of breast cancer, that the detection results and features help clinicians in making treatment

Designing a secure ubiquitous mammography consultation system

This thesis attempts to design and develop a prototype for mammography image consultation that can work securely within a ubiquitous environment. Mammogram images differ largely from other type of images and it requires special and dedicated techniques to identify the required regions of interest. Thus in Chapter 2 we started to explore the affectivity of the various traditional techniques based on convolution operators (e.g. Sobol, Pretwitt, Canny) for mammography edge detection. The second part of chapter 2 tries to enhance the results obtained via the traditional techniques by hybriding some of them. The hybriding technique is called in our thesis as Pipelined Operators. In this direction we proposed four pipeline operators, which contribute to the edge enhancement as well as abnormalities rendering through the introduction of an additional coloring mechanism. Although the visualization pipelines represent in our view an advancement on the traditional techniques applied to mammograms, such pipelines expose healthcare users to further usage complexities. For this purpose we extended our research work in chapter 2 to find a better single technique that can work smoothly within the healthcare system. In this direction, we developed in the third part of chapter 2 a novel technique for finding edges based on analyzing the dynamic and fuzzy nature of edges in mammograms. We called our developed method as "Dynamic Fuzzy Classifier or the DFC"