Breast tumour classification in DCE-MRI via cross-attention and discriminant correlation analysis enhanced feature fusion

Abstract

Aim

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) has proven to be highly sensitive in diagnosing breast tumours, due to the kinetic and volumetric features inherent in it. To utilise the kinetics-related and volume-related information, this paper aims to develop and validate a classification for differentiating benign and malignant breast tumours based on DCE-MRI, though fusing deep features and cross-attention-encoded radiomics features using discriminant correlation analysis (DCA).

Materials and methods

Classification experiments were conducted on a dataset comprising 261 individuals who underwent DCE-MRI including those with multiple tumours, resulting in 137 benign and 163 malignant tumours. To improve the strength of correlation between features and reduce features’ redundancy, a novel fusion method that fuses deep features and encoded radiomics features based on DCA (eFF-DCA) is proposed. The eFF-DCA includes three components: (1) a feature extraction module to capture kinetic information across phases, (2) a radiomics feature encoding module employing a cross-attention mechanism to enhance inter-phase feature correlation, and (3) a DCA-based fusion module that transforms features to maximise intra-class correlation while minimising inter-class redundancy, facilitating effective classification.

Results

The proposed eFF-DCA method achieved an accuracy of 90.9% and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.942, outperforming methods using single-modal features.

Conclusion

The proposed eFF-DCA utilises DCE-MRI kinetic-related and volume-related features to improve breast tumour diagnosis accuracy, but non–end-to-end design limits multimodal fusion. Future research should explore unified end-to-end deep learning architectures that enable seamless multimodal feature fusion and joint optimisation of feature extraction and classification.