Federated Breast Cancer Detection Enhanced by Synthetic Ultrasound Image Augmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generative model-based data augmentation method using synthetic ultrasound images to improve federated breast cancer detection models, demonstrating significant performance gains on multiple datasets.

Contribution

It presents a novel augmentation framework combining GANs and diffusion models to enhance federated learning for breast ultrasound classification.

Findings

Synthetic images improved AUC from 0.9206 to 0.9362 for FedAvg.

Synthetic images increased AUC from 0.9429 to 0.9574 for FedProx.

Excessive synthetic data can reduce model performance.

Abstract

Federated learning enables collaborative training of deep learning models across institutions without sharing sensitive patient data. However, its performance is often limited by small datasets and non-independent, identically distributed data, which can impair model generalization. In this work, we propose a generative model-based data augmentation framework for breast ultrasound classification. It leverages synthetic images generated by deep convolutional generative adversarial networks and a class-conditioned denoising diffusion probabilistic model. Experiments on three publicly available datasets (BUSI, BUS-BRA, and UDIAT) demonstrated that incorporating a suitable number of synthetic images improved average AUC from 0.9206 to 0.9362 for FedAvg and from 0.9429 to 0.9574 for FedProx. Furthermore, we noticed that excessive use of synthetic data reduced performance. This highlights the importance of balancing real and synthetic samples. Our results underscore the potential of generative model-based augmentation to enhance federated breast ultrasound image classification.