Katarzyna Gwoździewicz

Lidia Garrucho, Smriti Joshi, Kaisar Kushibar et al.

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are often developed using single-center data and evaluated using aggregate performance metrics, limiting their generalizability and obscuring potential performance disparities across demographic subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these limitations by introducing a large-scale benchmark that jointly evaluates primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under external testing and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

Grzegorz Skorupko, Fotios Avgoustidis, Carlos Martín-Isla et al.

The nnU-Net framework has played a crucial role in medical image segmentation and has become the gold standard in multitudes of applications targeting different diseases, organs, and modalities. However, so far it has been used primarily in a centralized approach where the collected data is stored in the same location where nnU-Net is trained. This centralized approach has various limitations, such as potential leakage of sensitive patient information and violation of patient privacy. Federated learning has emerged as a key approach for training segmentation models in a decentralized manner, enabling collaborative development while prioritising patient privacy. In this paper, we propose FednnU-Net, a plug-and-play, federated learning extension of the nnU-Net framework. To this end, we contribute two federated methodologies to unlock decentralized training of nnU-Net, namely, Federated Fingerprint Extraction (FFE) and Asymmetric Federated Averaging (AsymFedAvg). We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments demonstrating high and consistent performance of our methods for breast, cardiac and fetal segmentation based on a multi-modal collection of 6 datasets representing samples from 18 different institutions. To democratize research as well as real-world deployments of decentralized training in clinical centres, we publicly share our framework at https://github.com/faildeny/FednnUNet .

Lidia Garrucho, Kaisar Kushibar, Claire-Anne Reidel et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) research in breast cancer Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) faces challenges due to limited expert-labeled segmentations. To address this, we present a multicenter dataset of 1506 pre-treatment T1-weighted dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI cases, including expert annotations of primary tumors and non-mass-enhanced regions. The dataset integrates imaging data from four collections in The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), where only 163 cases with expert segmentations were initially available. To facilitate the annotation process, a deep learning model was trained to produce preliminary segmentations for the remaining cases. These were subsequently corrected and verified by 16 breast cancer experts (averaging 9 years of experience), creating a fully annotated dataset. Additionally, the dataset includes 49 harmonized clinical and demographic variables, as well as pre-trained weights for a baseline nnU-Net model trained on the annotated data. This resource addresses a critical gap in publicly available breast cancer datasets, enabling the development, validation, and benchmarking of advanced deep learning models, thus driving progress in breast cancer diagnostics, treatment response prediction, and personalized care.