Detecting Asymmetric Patterns and Localizing Cancers on Mammograms

One in eight women develops invasive breast cancer in her lifetime. The frontline protection against this disease is mammography. While computer-assisted diagnosis algorithms have made great progress in generating reliable global predictions, few focus on simultaneously producing regions of interest (ROIs) for biopsy. Can we combine ROI-oriented algorithms with global classification of cancer status, which simultaneously highlight suspicious regions and optimize classification performance? Can the asymmetry of breasts be adopted in deep learning for finding lesions and classifying cancers? We answer the above questions by building deep-learning networks that identify masses and microcalcifications in paired mammograms, exclude false positives, and stepwisely improve performance of the model with asymmetric information regarding the breasts. This method achieved a co-leading place in the Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge for predicting breast cancer. We highlight here the importance of this dual-purpose process that simultaneously provides the locations of potential lesions in mammograms.