Breast lesion detection using an anchor-free network from ultrasound images with segmentation-based enhancement

The survival rate of breast cancer patients is closely related to the pathological stage of cancer. The earlier the pathological stage, the higher the survival rate. Breast ultrasound is a commonly used breast cancer screening or diagnosis method, with simple operation, no ionizing radiation, and real-time imaging. However, ultrasound also has the disadvantages of high noise, strong artifacts, low contrast between tissue structures, which affect the effective screening of breast cancer. Therefore, we propose a deep learning based breast ultrasound detection system to assist doctors in the diagnosis of breast cancer. The system implements the automatic localization of breast cancer lesions and the diagnosis of benign and malignant lesions. The method consists of two steps: 1. Contrast enhancement of breast ultrasound images using segmentation-based enhancement methods. 2. An anchor-free network was used to detect and classify breast lesions. Our proposed method achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.902 on the datasets used in our experiment. In detecting benign and malignant tumors, precision is 0.917 and 0.888, and recall is 0.980 and 0.963, respectively. Our proposed method outperforms other image enhancement methods and an anchor-based detection method. We propose a breast ultrasound image detection system for breast cancer detection. The system can locate and diagnose benign and malignant breast lesions. The test results on single dataset and mixed dataset show that the proposed method has good performance.