MeisenMeister: A Simple Two Stage Pipeline for Breast Cancer Classification on MRI

TL;DR

MeisenMeister is a straightforward two-stage pipeline designed for breast cancer classification on MRI scans, emphasizing robustness and clinical relevance to improve early detection in large-scale screening.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple yet effective two-stage pipeline specifically tailored for breast cancer classification on MRI, addressing challenges like limited labeled data and emphasizing practical clinical application.

Findings

Achieved competitive classification performance on breast MRI data.

Demonstrated robustness and clinical relevance of the pipeline.

Provided publicly available implementation for reproducibility.

Abstract

The ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge 2025 addresses a critical issue in breast cancer screening: improving early detection through more efficient and accurate interpretation of breast MRI scans. Even though methods for general-purpose whole-body lesion segmentation as well as multi-time-point analysis exist, breast cancer detection remains highly challenging, largely due to the limited availability of high-quality segmentation labels. Therefore, developing robust classification-based approaches is crucial for the future of early breast cancer detection, particularly in applications such as large-scale screening. In this write-up, we provide a comprehensive overview of our approach to the challenge. We begin by detailing the underlying concept and foundational assumptions that guided our work. We then describe the iterative development process, highlighting the key stages of experimentation, evaluation, and refinement that shaped the evolution of our solution. Finally, we present the reasoning and evidence that informed the design choices behind our final submission, with a focus on performance, robustness, and clinical relevance. We release our full implementation publicly at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/MeisenMeister