A Novel Deep Learning Model for Breast Tumor Ultrasound Image Classification with Lesion Region Perception

Abstract

Multi-task learning (MTL) methods are widely applied in breast imaging for lesion area perception and classification to assist in breast cancer diagnosis and personalized treatment. A typical paradigm of MTL is the shared-backbone network architecture, which can lead to information sharing conflicts and result in the decline or even failure of the main task’s performance. Therefore, extracting richer lesion features and alleviating information-sharing conflicts has become a significant challenge for breast cancer classification. This study proposes a novel Multi-Feature Fusion Multi-Task (MFFMT) model to effectively address this issue. Firstly, in order to better capture the local and global feature relationships of lesion areas, a Contextual Lesion Enhancement Perception (CLEP) module is designed, which integrates channel attention mechanisms with detailed spatial positional information to extract more comprehensive lesion feature information. Secondly, a novel Multi-Feature Fusion (MFF) module is presented. The MFF module effectively extracts differential features that distinguish between lesion-specific characteristics and the semantic features used for tumor classification, and enhances the common feature information of them as well. Experimental results on two public breast ultrasound imaging datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, a comprehensive study on the impact of various factors on the model’s performance is conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the working mechanism of the proposed framework.