Diffusion Model for Mammography Anomaly Detection

Mammography is the leading methodology used to diagnose breast cancer. Effective, cheap and reliable, the mammography can be used to screen large populations, if the imagery produced can be analysed efficiently. State-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence approaches can be used to create tools able to aid in this task. Here we present a study focused on the emerging research topic of the application of generative diffusion models to the task of anomaly detection and we apply if for detecting anomalies on mammograms. Diffusion models exhibit promising results in making pixel-level predictions with image level annotations, but no such application has been published so far regarding mammography. We have, therefore, developed a novel approach utilizing U-net backbone that is able to generate mammograms with Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 14.62. We showed its ability to perform anomaly detection with Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.195 which demonstrates the viability of our approach for early-stage research.