Deep learning for automatic detection of abnormal findings in breast mammography

Abstract

Automatic identification of abnormalities is a key problem in medical imaging. While the majority of previous work in mammography has focused on classification of abnormalities rather than detection and localization, here we introduce a novel deep learning method for detection of masses and calcifications. The power of this approach comes from generating an ensemble of individual Faster-RCNN models each trained for a specific set of abnormal clinical categories, together with extending a modified two stage Faster-RCNN scheme to a three stage cascade. The third stage being an additional classifier working directly on the image pixels with the handful of sub-windows generated by the first two stages. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on the INBreast benchmark and on a large internal multi-center dataset. Quantitative results compete well with state of the art in terms of accuracy. Computationally the methods runs significantly faster than current state-of-the art techniques.