Nazanin Mobini, Davide Capra, Anna Colarieti, Moreno Zanardo, Giuseppe Baselli, Francesco Sardanelli
{"title":"Deep transfer learning for detection of breast arterial calcifications on mammograms: a comparative study.","authors":"Nazanin Mobini, Davide Capra, Anna Colarieti, Moreno Zanardo, Giuseppe Baselli, Francesco Sardanelli","doi":"10.1186/s41747-024-00478-6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Breast arterial calcifications (BAC) are common incidental findings on routine mammograms, which have been suggested as a sex-specific biomarker of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Previous work showed the efficacy of a pretrained convolutional network (CNN), VCG16, for automatic BAC detection. In this study, we further tested the method by a comparative analysis with other ten CNNs.</p><p><strong>Material and methods: </strong>Four-view standard mammography exams from 1,493 women were included in this retrospective study and labeled as BAC or non-BAC by experts. The comparative study was conducted using eleven pretrained convolutional networks (CNNs) with varying depths from five architectures including Xception, VGG, ResNetV2, MobileNet, and DenseNet, fine-tuned for the binary BAC classification task. Performance evaluation involved area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC-ROC) analysis, F<sub>1</sub>-score (harmonic mean of precision and recall), and generalized gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM++) for visual explanations.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>The dataset exhibited a BAC prevalence of 194/1,493 women (13.0%) and 581/5,972 images (9.7%). Among the retrained models, VGG, MobileNet, and DenseNet demonstrated the most promising results, achieving AUC-ROCs > 0.70 in both training and independent testing subsets. In terms of testing F<sub>1</sub>-score, VGG16 ranked first, higher than MobileNet (0.51) and VGG19 (0.46). Qualitative analysis showed that the Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated by VGG16 consistently outperformed those produced by others, offering a finer-grained and discriminative localization of calcified regions within images.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>Deep transfer learning showed promise in automated BAC detection on mammograms, where relatively shallow networks demonstrated superior performances requiring shorter training times and reduced resources.</p><p><strong>Relevance statement: </strong>Deep transfer learning is a promising approach to enhance reporting BAC on mammograms and facilitate developing efficient tools for cardiovascular risk stratification in women, leveraging large-scale mammographic screening programs.</p><p><strong>Key points: </strong>• We tested different pretrained convolutional networks (CNNs) for BAC detection on mammograms. • VGG and MobileNet demonstrated promising performances, outperforming their deeper, more complex counterparts. • Visual explanations using Grad-CAM++ highlighted VGG16's superior performance in localizing BAC.</p>","PeriodicalId":36926,"journal":{"name":"European Radiology Experimental","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11247067/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"European Radiology Experimental","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s41747-024-00478-6","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"RADIOLOGY, NUCLEAR MEDICINE & MEDICAL IMAGING","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Introduction: Breast arterial calcifications (BAC) are common incidental findings on routine mammograms, which have been suggested as a sex-specific biomarker of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Previous work showed the efficacy of a pretrained convolutional network (CNN), VCG16, for automatic BAC detection. In this study, we further tested the method by a comparative analysis with other ten CNNs.
Material and methods: Four-view standard mammography exams from 1,493 women were included in this retrospective study and labeled as BAC or non-BAC by experts. The comparative study was conducted using eleven pretrained convolutional networks (CNNs) with varying depths from five architectures including Xception, VGG, ResNetV2, MobileNet, and DenseNet, fine-tuned for the binary BAC classification task. Performance evaluation involved area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC-ROC) analysis, F1-score (harmonic mean of precision and recall), and generalized gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM++) for visual explanations.
Results: The dataset exhibited a BAC prevalence of 194/1,493 women (13.0%) and 581/5,972 images (9.7%). Among the retrained models, VGG, MobileNet, and DenseNet demonstrated the most promising results, achieving AUC-ROCs > 0.70 in both training and independent testing subsets. In terms of testing F1-score, VGG16 ranked first, higher than MobileNet (0.51) and VGG19 (0.46). Qualitative analysis showed that the Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated by VGG16 consistently outperformed those produced by others, offering a finer-grained and discriminative localization of calcified regions within images.
Conclusion: Deep transfer learning showed promise in automated BAC detection on mammograms, where relatively shallow networks demonstrated superior performances requiring shorter training times and reduced resources.
Relevance statement: Deep transfer learning is a promising approach to enhance reporting BAC on mammograms and facilitate developing efficient tools for cardiovascular risk stratification in women, leveraging large-scale mammographic screening programs.
Key points: • We tested different pretrained convolutional networks (CNNs) for BAC detection on mammograms. • VGG and MobileNet demonstrated promising performances, outperforming their deeper, more complex counterparts. • Visual explanations using Grad-CAM++ highlighted VGG16's superior performance in localizing BAC.