Automated breast cancer lesion detection on breast MRI using artificial intelligence.

Abstract

e14612 Background: Over 40,000 women in the US will die from breast cancer. Early detection of cancer is crucial and is a potential avenue to improve survival. The objective of this research study is to develop a convoluted neural network (CNN), a subset of artificial intelligence, in order to enhance computerized detection of breast lesions on MRIs. Methods: This is an institutional review board approved retrospective study with post contrast MRI data from 238 patients. Breast tumor segmentation was automated with a hybrid 3D/2D CNN designed adapted from U-net, a popular neural network architecture in biomedical image analysis. T1 post-contrast MRI volumes were used to train the network. The data set was separated into training (80%) and validation (20%) sets. Re-sampling and normalization using z-scores were applied to each volume before training. Contracting and expanding arms of the model consist of successive convolutions followed by batch normalization and ReLU operations. Ground truth was established through manual segmentation and previously conducted readings of the images used to train our network. Results: A 5-fold cross validation was performed for analysis. The Dice similarity coefficient was used to assess segmentation accuracy. The hybrid 3D/2D U-Net architecture yielded a Dice score of 0.753 and a Pearson correlation of 0.548 for the breast tumor segmentation. Conclusions: These results demonstrated the feasibility for artificial intelligence applications in accurately identifying the presence of lesions on breast MRI images.