A comparative study of breast tumour detection using a semantic segmentation network coupled with different pretrained CNNs

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies and the primary origin of cancer-related deaths among females worldwide. Ultrasound image segmentation plays a crucial role in identifying breast tumours by precisely delineating the boundaries of the tumour within the images. Deep learning segmentation networks such as DeepLabV3+ have been used in the literature for this purpose. The coupling of DeepLabV3+ with base convolutional neural networks (CNN) can play a key role in its accuracy in tumour detection. The present study investigates the segmentation performance of four combinations of DeepLabV3+ segmentation network by coupling with the four base decoder CNN networks: DarkNet53, SqueezeNet, EfficientNet-b0 and DarkNet19. The accuracy of segmentation is confirmed using standard segmentation error metrics such as global and mean accuracy, mean and weighted Intersection over union (IoU), Boundary F1 (BF) Score and Dice Score. DeepLabV3+ coupled with DarkNet53 and EfficientNet-b0 as the decoder CNNs performed better than the other two combinations with a global accuracy of 96.50% and 96.18%. Precise tumour delineation can assist in tumour growth monitoring and treatment planning by providing detailed information on tumour size, shape, and location; thereby aiding in patient management and follow-up care.