Automated abnormalities detection in mammography using deep learning

Abstract

Breast cancer is the second most prevalent cause of cancer death and the most common malignancy among women, posing a life-threatening risk. Treatment for breast cancer can be highly effective, with a survival chance of 90% or higher, especially when the disease is detected early. This paper introduces a groundbreaking deep U-Net framework for mammography breast cancer images to perform automatic detection of abnormalities. The objective is to provide segmented images that show areas of tumors more accurately than other deep learning techniques. The proposed framework consists of three steps. The first step is image preprocessing using the Li algorithm to minimize the cross-entropy between the foreground and the background, contrast enhancement using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), normalization, and median filtering. The second step involves data augmentation to mitigate overfitting and underfitting, and the final step is implementing a convolutional encoder-decoder network-based U-Net architecture, characterized by high precision in medical image analysis. The framework has been tested on two comprehensive public datasets, namely INbreast and CBIS-DDSM. Several metrics have been adopted for quantitative performance assessment, including the Dice score, sensitivity, Hausdorff distance, Jaccard coefficient, precision, and F1 score. Quantitative results on the INbreast dataset show an average Dice score of 85.61% and a sensitivity of 81.26%. On the CBIS-DDSM dataset, the average Dice score is 87.98%, and the sensitivity reaches 90.58%. The experimental results ensure earlier and more accurate abnormality detection. Furthermore, the success of the proposed deep learning framework in mammography shows promise for broader applications in medical imaging, potentially revolutionizing various radiological practices.