3D Context-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for False Positive Reduction in Clustered Microcalcifications Detection

False positives (FPs) reduction is indispensable for clustered microcalcifications (MCs) detection in digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), since there might be excessive false candidates in the detection stage. Considering that DBT volume has an anisotropic resolution, we proposed a novel 3D context-aware convolutional neural network (CNN) to reduce FPs, which consists of a 2D intra-slices feature extraction branch and a 3D inter-slice features fusion branch. In particular, 3D anisotropic convolutions were designed to learn representations from DBT volumes and inter-slice information fusion is only performed on the feature map level, which could avoid the influence of anisotropic resolution of DBT volume. The proposed method was evaluated on a large-scale Chinese women population of 877 cases with 1754 DBT volumes and compared with 8 related methods. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieved the best performance with an accuracy of 92.68% for FPs reduction with an AUC of 97.65%, and the FPs are 0.0512 per DBT volume at a sensitivity of 90%. This also proved that making full use of 3D contextual information of DBT volume can improve the performance of the classification algorithm.