A robust and efficient AI assistant for breast tumor segmentation from DCE-MRI via a spatial-temporal framework

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) allows screening, follow up, and diagnosis for breast tumor with high sensitivity. Accurate tumor segmentation from DCE-MRI can provide crucial information of tumor location and shape, which significantly influences the downstream clinical decisions. In this paper, we aim to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant to automatically segment breast tumors by capturing dynamic changes in multi-phase DCE-MRI with a spatial-temporal framework. The main advantages of our AI assistant include (1) robustness, i.e., our model can handle MR data with different phase numbers and imaging intervals, as demonstrated on a large-scale dataset from seven medical centers, and (2) efficiency, i.e., our AI assistant significantly reduces the time required for manual annotation by a factor of 20, while maintaining accuracy comparable to that of physicians. More importantly, as the fundamental step to build an AI-assisted breast cancer diagnosis system, our AI assistant will promote the application of AI in more clinical diagnostic practices regarding breast cancer.