Visualizing the Invisible: Enhancing Radiologist Performance in Breast Mammography via Task-Driven Chromatic Encoding
Hui Ye, Shilong Yang, Chulong Zhang, Yexuan Xing, Juan Yu, Yaoqin Xie, Wei Zhang

TL;DR
MammoColor uses task-driven chromatic encoding to enhance mammogram visualization, significantly improving radiologist performance, especially in dense breasts, by reducing false positives and increasing diagnostic accuracy.
Contribution
Introduces MammoColor with a novel TDCE module that enhances mammogram interpretation through visual augmentation, validated across multiple datasets and clinical studies.
Findings
Improved AUC from 0.7669 to 0.8461 on VinDr-Mammo
Enhanced specificity from 0.90 to 0.96 in MRMC study
Greater performance gains in dense breast cases
Abstract
Purpose:Mammography screening is less sensitive in dense breasts, where tissue overlap and subtle findings increase perceptual difficulty. We present MammoColor, an end-to-end framework with a Task-Driven Chromatic Encoding (TDCE) module that converts single-channel mammograms into TDCE-encoded views for visual augmentation. Materials and Methods:MammoColor couples a lightweight TDCE module with a BI-RADS triage classifier and was trained end-to-end on VinDr-Mammo. Performance was evaluated on an internal test set, two public datasets (CBIS-DDSM and INBreast), and three external clinical cohorts. We also conducted a multi-reader, multi-case (MRMC) observer study with a washout period, comparing (1) grayscale-only, (2) TDCE-only, and (3) side-by-side grayscale+TDCE. Results:On VinDr-Mammo, MammoColor improved AUC from 0.7669 to 0.8461 (P=0.004). Gains were larger in dense breasts (AUC…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDigital Radiography and Breast Imaging · AI in cancer detection · Global Cancer Incidence and Screening
