Discrimination of Breast Cancer Based on Ultrasound Images and Convolutional Neural Network

The aim of our study was to establish an artificial intelligence tool for the diagnosis of breast disease base on ultrasound (US) images. A deep learning algorithm Efficient-Det assisted US diagnosis method was developed to determine breast suspicious lesions as benign, malignant, or normal. Totally 1181 US images from 487 patients of our hospital and 694 publicly accessible images were employed for modeling, including 558 benign images, 370 malignant images, and 253 normal tissue images. The actual diagnosis results for the patients were determined by the biopsy or surgery. Efficient-Det was first retrained using an exclusive public breast cancer US dataset with transfer learning techniques. A blind test set consisting of 50 benign, 50 malignant, and 50 normal tissue images was randomly picked from the patients' images as the independent test set to test its searching ability on suspicious tumor regions. Furthermore, the confusion matrix and classification accuracy were employed as evaluation metrics to select the optimal classification models. Efficient-Det has demonstrated remarkable progress in general image recognition tasks with specific advantages of locating and identifying tumor areas simultaneously. Compared to the manual method (mean accuracy: 95.3% and 60 s per image) and traditional feature engineering method (mean accuracy: 90% and 15 s per image), our Efficient-Det has the capability of providing a competitive (mean accuracy: 92.6%) and fast (0.06 s per image) classification result. The deployment of Efficient-Det in our local breast cancer discrimination task exhibits specific applicability within real clinical workflows.