Detection of masses in mammograms using a one-stage object detector based on a deep convolutional neural network

Several computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed for mammography. They are widely used in certain countries such as the U.S. where mammography studies are conducted more frequently; however, they are not yet globally employed for clinical use due to their inconsistent performance, which can be attributed to their reliance on hand-crafted features. It is difficult to use hand-crafted features for mammogram images that vary due to factors such as the breast density of patients and differences in imaging devices. To address these problems, several studies have leveraged a deep convolutional neural network that does not require hand-crafted features. Among the recent object detectors, RetinaNet is particularly promising as it is a simpler one-stage object detector that is fast and efficient while achieving state-of-the-art performance. RetinaNet has been proven to perform conventional object detection tasks but has not been tested on detecting masses in mammograms. Thus, we propose a mass detection model based on RetinaNet. To validate its performance in diverse use cases, we construct several experimental setups using the public dataset INbreast and the in-house dataset GURO. In addition to training and testing on the same dataset (i.e., training and testing on INbreast), we evaluate our mass detection model in setups using additional training data (i.e., training on INbreast + GURO and testing on INbreast). We also evaluate our model in setups using pre-trained weights (i.e., using weights pre-trained on GURO, training and testing on INbreast). In all the experiments, our mass detection model achieves comparable or better performance than more complex state-of-the-art models including the two-stage object detector. Also, the results show that using the weights pre-trained on datasets achieves similar performance as directly using datasets in the training phase. Therefore, we make our mass detection model’s weights pre-trained on both GURO and INbreast publicly available. We expect that researchers who train RetinaNet on their in-house dataset for the mass detection task can use our pre-trained weights to leverage the features extracted from the datasets.