Deep learning for differentiating benign from malignant tumors on breast-specific gamma image

Breast diseases are a significant health threat for women. With the fast-growing BSGI data, it is becoming increasingly critical for physicians to accurately diagnose benign as well as malignant breast tumors.

The purpose of this study is to diagnose benign and malignant breast tumors utilizing the deep learning model, with the input of breast-specific gamma imaging (BSGI).

A benchmark dataset including 144 patients with benign tumors and 87 patients with malignant tumors was collected and divided into a training dataset and a test dataset according to the ratio of 8:2. The convolutional neural network ResNet18 was employed to develop a new deep learning model. The model proposed was compared with neural network and autoencoder models. Accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and ROC were used to evaluate the performance of different models.

The accuracy, specificity and sensitivity of the model proposed are 99.1%, 98.8% and 99.3% respectively, which achieves the best performance among all methods. Additionally, the Grad-CAM method is used to analyze the interpretability of the diagnostic results based on the deep learning model.

This study demonstrates that the proposed deep learning method could help physicians diagnose benign and malignant breast tumors quickly as well as reliably.