Comparative Analysis of Segment Anything Model and U-Net for Breast Tumor Detection in Ultrasound and Mammography Images

TL;DR

This study compares U-Net and pretrained SAM architectures for breast tumor segmentation in ultrasound and mammography images, finding U-Net more accurate especially in complex cases, highlighting the importance of architecture choice in medical imaging.

Contribution

The paper provides a comparative analysis of U-Net and pretrained SAM models specifically for breast tumor segmentation, demonstrating U-Net's superior performance in challenging scenarios.

Findings

U-Net outperforms SAM in tumor segmentation accuracy.

U-Net handles irregular shapes and indistinct boundaries better.

SAM shows limitations with malignant tumors and complex shapes.

Abstract

In this study, the main objective is to develop an algorithm capable of identifying and delineating tumor regions in breast ultrasound (BUS) and mammographic images. The technique employs two advanced deep learning architectures, namely U-Net and pretrained SAM, for tumor segmentation. The U-Net model is specifically designed for medical image segmentation and leverages its deep convolutional neural network framework to extract meaningful features from input images. On the other hand, the pretrained SAM architecture incorporates a mechanism to capture spatial dependencies and generate segmentation results. Evaluation is conducted on a diverse dataset containing annotated tumor regions in BUS and mammographic images, covering both benign and malignant tumors. This dataset enables a comprehensive assessment of the algorithm's performance across different tumor types. Results demonstrate that the U-Net model outperforms the pretrained SAM architecture in accurately identifying and segmenting tumor regions in both BUS and mammographic images. The U-Net exhibits superior performance in challenging cases involving irregular shapes, indistinct boundaries, and high tumor heterogeneity. In contrast, the pretrained SAM architecture exhibits limitations in accurately identifying tumor areas, particularly for malignant tumors and objects with weak boundaries or complex shapes. These findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate deep learning architectures tailored for medical image segmentation. The U-Net model showcases its potential as a robust and accurate tool for tumor detection, while the pretrained SAM architecture suggests the need for further improvements to enhance segmentation performance.