Breast cancer segmentation of mammographics images using generative adversarial network

Abstract

Segmentation of breast cancer tumor plays an important role in identifying the location of the tumor, to know the shape of tumor and hence the stage of breast cancer. This paper deals with the segmentation of tumor from whole mammographic mass images using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). A mini dataset was considered with mammograms and their corresponding ground truth images. Pre-processing like image format conversion, enhancement, pectoral muscle removal and resizing was performed on raw mammogram images. GANs have two neural nets called generative and discriminative networks that compete against each other to obtain the segmentation output. PIX2PIX is a conditional GAN variant which has U-Net as the Generator network and a simple deep neural net as the discriminator. The input to the network was pair of pre-processed mass image and the associated ground truth. A binary image with highlighted tumor was obtained as output. The performance of GAN was evaluated by plotting Generator and discriminator loss. The segmented output was compared with corresponding ground truth. Metrics like Jaccard index, Jaccard distance and Dice-coefficient were calculated. A Dice-coefficient and Jaccard index of 90% and 88.38% was achieved. In future, higher accuracy could be achieved by involving larger dataset to make the system robust.