Local-Whole-Focus: Identifying Breast Masses and Calcified Clusters on Full-Size Mammograms

The detection of breast masses and calcified clusters on mammograms is critical for early diagnosis and treatment to improve the survivals of breast cancer patients. In this study, we propose a local-whole-focus pipeline to automatically identify breast masses and calcified clusters on full-size mammograms, from local breast tissues to the whole mammograms, and then focusing on the lesion areas. We first train a deep model to learn the fine features of breast masses and calcified clusteres on local breast tissues, and then transfer the well-trained deep model to identify breast masses and calcified clusteres on full-size mammograms with image-level annotations. We also highlight the areas of the breast masses and calcified clusteres in mammograms to visualize the identification results. We evaluated the proposed local-whole-focus pipeline on a public dataset CBIS-DDSM (Curated Breast Imaging Subset of Digital Database for Screening Mammography) and a private dataset MY-Mammo (Mianyang central hospital mammograms). The experiment results showed the DenseNet embedded with squeeze-and-excitation (SE) blocks achieved competitive results on the identification of breast masses and calcified clusteres on full-size mammograms. The highlight areas of the breast masses and calcified clusteres on the entire mammograms could also explain model decision making, which are important in practical medical applications. Index Terms–Breast mass, calcified cluster, local breast tissue, full-size mammogram, automatic identification.