Microcalcification detection in mammography image using computer-aided detection based on convolutional neural network

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer among women and the survival rate tends to be low when its stage found high when treated. To improve breast cancer survival, early detection is critical. There are two ways of detection for breast cancer: early diagnosis and screening. To make an accurate diagnosis in the early stage of breast cancer, the appearance of masses and micro-calcifications on the mammography image are two important indicators. It is time-consuming and challenging to identify micro-calcification from mammogram images by the human eye because of its size and appearance. Several Computer-Aided Detection (CADe) have been developed to support radiologists because the automatic detection of micro-calcification is important for diagnosis and the next recommended treatment. Most of the current CADe systems at this time started using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to implement the micro-calcification detection in mammograms and their quantitative results are very satisfying, the average level of accuracy is more than 90%. However, most of the methods used are image fragments from a complete image which are then included in the program. This research conducts an automated approach to detect the location of any micro-calcification in the mammogram images with the complete image and in a simple way. At first, the image preprocessing algorithms were applied to enhance the image quality. After that, the micro-calcification region was labeled using image segmentation based on the Radiologist's expertise. The positive label which contains micro-calcification pixels was taken to train with segmentation network. A total of 354 images from INbreast dataset were used in this research study. Finally, the trained network was utilized to detect the micro-calcification area automatically from the mammogram images. This process can help as an assistant to the radiologist for early diagnosis and increase the detection accuracy of the micro-calcification regions. The proposed system performance is measured according to the error values of Mean Squared Logarithmic Error (MSLE) as the technique to find out the difference between the values predicted by the proposed model and the actual values. The best MSLE loss value obtained was achieved in 0.05 with accuracy 0.95.