YOLO-LOGO: A transformer-based YOLO segmentation model for breast mass detection and segmentation in digital mammograms.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Both mass detection and segmentation in digital mammograms play a crucial role in early breast cancer detection and treatment. Furthermore, clinical experience has shown that they are the upstream tasks of pathological classification of breast lesions. Recent advancements in deep learning have made the analyses faster and more accurate. This study aims to develop a deep learning model architecture for breast cancer mass detection and segmentation using the mammography.

METHODS

In this work we proposed a double shot model for mass detection and segmentation simultaneously using a combination of YOLO (You Only Look Once) and LOGO (Local-Global) architectures. Firstly, we adopted YoloV5L6, the state-of-the-art object detection model, to position and crop the breast mass in mammograms with a high resolution; Secondly, to balance training efficiency and segmentation performance, we modified the LOGO training strategy to train the whole images and cropped images on the global and local transformer branches separately. The two branches were then merged to form the final segmentation decision.

RESULTS

The proposed YOLO-LOGO model was tested on two independent mammography datasets (CBIS-DDSM and INBreast). The proposed model performs significantly better than previous works. It achieves true positive rate 95.7% and mean average precision 65.0% for mass detection on CBIS-DDSM dataset. Its performance for mass segmentation on CBIS-DDSM dataset is F1-score=74.5% and IoU=64.0%. The similar performance trend is observed in another independent dataset INBreast as well.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed model has a higher efficiency and better performance, reduces computational requirements, and improves the versatility and accuracy of computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis. Hence it has the potential to enable more assistance for doctors in early breast cancer detection and treatment, thereby reducing mortality.