A generative adversarial network-based abnormality detection using only normal images for model training with application to digital breast tomosynthesis.

Journal: Scientific reports
PMID:

Abstract

Deep learning has shown tremendous potential in the task of object detection in images. However, a common challenge with this task is when only a limited number of images containing the object of interest are available. This is a particular issue in cancer screening, such as digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), where less than 1% of cases contain cancer. In this study, we propose a method to train an inpainting generative adversarial network to be used for cancer detection using only images that do not contain cancer. During inference, we removed a part of the image and used the network to complete the removed part. A significant error in completing an image part was considered an indication that such location is unexpected and thus abnormal. A large dataset of DBT images used in this study was collected at Duke University. It consisted of 19,230 reconstructed volumes from 4348 patients. Cancerous masses and architectural distortions were marked with bounding boxes by radiologists. Our experiments showed that the locations containing cancer were associated with a notably higher completion error than the non-cancer locations (mean error ratio of 2.77). All data used in this study has been made publicly available by the authors.

Authors

  • Albert Swiecicki
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, USA.
  • Nicholas Konz
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
  • Mateusz Buda
    Department of Radiology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA; School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Electronic address: buda@kth.se.
  • Maciej A Mazurowski
    Department of Radiology, Duke University School of Medicine, 2424 Erwin Road, Suite 302, Durham, NC, 27705, USA.