A State-of-the-Art Survey on Deep Learning Methods for Detection of Architectural Distortion From Digital Mammography

Breast cancer is a type of cancer that has risen to be the second cause of death among women. Classification of breast tissues into normal, benign, or malignant depends on the presence of abnormalities like microcalcifications, masses, architectural distortions, and asymmetries. Architectural distortion (AD) is subtle in detection with no association with masses but shows the abnormal arrangement of tissue strands, often in a radial, spiculation, or random pattern. It is widely rated as the third symptom of breast cancer which is the most commonly missed abnormality. Most computational approaches characterizing abnormalities in breast images often concentrate on the detection of microcalcification and masses with architectural distortions appearing as a secondary finding. The subtle nature and a minimal occurrence of architectural distortions may seem to complicate computational approaches for its detection. As a result, little research interest has been recorded in this area. It is widely reported that some cases of recent breast cancer are wrongly diagnosed due to the omission in detecting the presence of architectural distortion at the early stage of the disease. However, we discovered that most computational solutions to early detection of breast cancer are focused mainly on detecting other abnormalities such as masses and microcalcification, which are some evidence of the advanced stage of the disease. To emphasise the little efforts channeled towards detection of AD compared to other abnormalities, this article aims to detail the review of such studies in the last decade. To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the first review which focuses on the detection of architectural distortion (AD) from mammographic images. Furthermore, this article presents a comprehensive review of approaches, advances, and challenges on the computational methods for detecting AD, with the sole aim of advancing the use of deep learning models in detecting AD. Moreover, a comparative study of performance analyses of articles surveyed in this article is investigated. Our findings revealed that about 70% of the existing literature adopted Gabor Filters, while just less than 10% leveraged on the state-of-the-art performances recorded in computer vision and deep learning, in building outstanding computational models for the detection of AD. The current study also discovered that using a deep learning approach, such as the convolution neural network (CNN) method, can yield a significant increase in performance for the task of detection of architectural distortions. This assertion is based on literature results obtained using the CNN, which generates an accuracy of 99.4% compared to the use of Gabor filters method, which accounts for 95% accuracy.