Diagnosis of Breast Cancer with Strongly Supervised Deep Learning Neural Network

The strongly supervised deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has better performance in assessing breast cancer (BC) because of the more accurate features from the slice-level precise labeling compared with the image-level labeling weakly supervised DCNN. However, manual slice-level precise labeling is time consuming and expensive. In addition, the slice-level diagnosis adopted in the DCNN system is incomplete and defective because of the lack of other slices' information. In this paper, we studied the impact of the region of interest (ROI) and lesion-level multi-slice diagnosis in the DCNN auxiliary diagnosis system. Firstly, we proposed an improved region-growing algorithm to generate slice-level precise ROI. Secondly, we adopted the average weighting method as the lesion-level diagnosis criteria after exploring four different weighting methods. Finally, we proposed our complete system, which combined the densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) with the slice-level ROI and the average weighting lesion-level diagnosis after evaluating the performance of five DCNNs. The proposed system achieved an AUC of 0.958, an accuracy of 92.5%, a sensitivity of 95.0%, and a specificity of 90.0%. The experimental results showed that our proposed system had a better performance in BC diagnosis because of the more precise ROI and more complete information of multi-slices.