Comparison of Current Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for the Segmentation of Breast Masses in Mammograms

Breast cancer causes approximately 684,996 deaths worldwide, making it the leading cause of female cancer mortality. However, these figures can be reduced with early diagnosis through mammographic imaging, allowing for the timely and effective treatment of this disease. To establish the best tools for contributing to the automatic diagnosis of breast cancer, different deep learning (DL) architectures were compared in terms of breast lesion segmentation, lesion type classification, and degree of suspicion of malignancy tests. The tasks were completed with state-of-the-art architectures and backbones. Initially, during segmentation, the base UNet, Visual Geometry Group 19 (VGG19), InceptionResNetV2, EfficientNet, MobileNetv2, ResNet, ResNeXt, MultiResUNet, linkNet-VGG19, DenseNet, SEResNet and SeResNeXt architectures were compared, where “Res” denotes a residual network. In addition, training was performed with 5 of the most advanced loss functions and validated by the Dice coefficient, sensitivity, and specificity. The proposed models achieved Dice values above 90%, with the EfficientNet architecture achieving 94.75% and 99% accuracy on the two tasks. Subsequently, classification was addressed with the ResNet50V2, VGG19, InceptionResNetV2, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, Xception and EfficientNetB7 networks. The proposed models achieved 96.97% and 97.73% accuracy through the VGG19 and ResNet50V2 networks on the lesion classification and degree of suspicion tasks, respectively. All three tasks were addressed with open-access databases, including the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM), the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database, and INbreast.