Automatic Breast Lesion Detection in Ultrafast DCE-MRI Using Deep Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning-based method for detecting breast lesions in ultrafast DCE-MRI, leveraging 3D spatial and temporal information to improve detection accuracy of small, hard-to-differentiate lesions.

Contribution

It presents a modified 3D RetinaNet model that effectively detects small breast lesions in ultrafast MRI, enhancing screening accuracy with a focus on challenging cases.

Findings

Achieved 90% sensitivity at 4 false positives per breast

Detected 81% of benign lesions with high accuracy

Model performs well on a large dataset of 489 studies

Abstract

Purpose: We propose a deep learning-based computer-aided detection (CADe) method to detect breast lesions in ultrafast DCE-MRI sequences. This method uses both the three-dimensional spatial information and temporal information obtained from the early-phase of the dynamic acquisition. Methods: The proposed CADe method, based on a modified 3D RetinaNet model, operates on ultrafast T1 weighted sequences, which are preprocessed for motion compensation, temporal normalization, and are cropped before passing into the model. The model is optimized to enable the detection of relatively small breast lesions in a screening setting, focusing on detection of lesions that are harder to differentiate from confounding structures inside the breast. Results: The method was developed based on a dataset consisting of 489 ultrafast MRI studies obtained from 462 patients containing a total of 572 lesions (365 malignant, 207 benign) and achieved a detection rate, sensitivity, and detection rate of benign lesions of 0.90 (0.876-0.934), 0.95 (0.934-0.980), and 0.81 (0.751-0.871) at 4 false positives per normal breast with 10-fold cross-testing, respectively. Conclusions: The deep learning architecture used for the proposed CADe application can efficiently detect benign and malignant lesions on ultrafast DCE-MRI. Furthermore, utilizing the less visible hard-to detect-lesions in training improves the learning process and, subsequently, detection of malignant breast lesions.