A training regime to learn unified representations from complementary breast imaging modalities
This addresses the issue of increased exam times and radiation dosage in breast cancer screening, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing machine learning methods for medical imaging.
The paper tackled the problem of reducing reliance on combined DBT-FFDM breast imaging by learning unified representations from both modalities, resulting in more accurate lesion detection than models based on either modality alone.
Full Field Digital Mammograms (FFDMs) and Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) are the two most widely used imaging modalities for breast cancer screening. Although DBT has increased cancer detection compared to FFDM, its widespread adoption in clinical practice has been slowed by increased interpretation times and a perceived decrease in the conspicuity of specific lesion types. Specifically, the non-inferiority of DBT for microcalcifications remains under debate. Due to concerns about the decrease in visual acuity, combined DBT-FFDM acquisitions remain popular, leading to overall increased exam times and radiation dosage. Enabling DBT to provide diagnostic information present in both FFDM and DBT would reduce reliance on FFDM, resulting in a reduction in both quantities. We propose a machine learning methodology that learns high-level representations leveraging the complementary diagnostic signal from both DBT and FFDM. Experiments on a large-scale data set validate our claims and show that our representations enable more accurate breast lesion detection than any DBT- or FFDM-based model.