Automatic semantic segmentation of breast cancer in DCE-MRI using DeepLabV3+with modified ResNet50

Research on breast cancer segmentation is essential due to its high prevalence as the most common cancer in women and its occurrence in men as well. Breast cancer involves abnormal cell growth in the breast, highlighting the importance of advanced imaging. Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) is an effective technique for this purpose. Deep learning has significantly influenced medical imaging in recent years, especially in accurately segmenting tumors from MRI images. Two techniques have been proposed for breast tumor segmentation: Dilated ResNet50 (RN50D) and Parallel Layers Added ResNet50 (PLA-RN50). RN50D involves altering the dilation factor of the convolution layer within the residual block of ResNet50. PLA-RN50 entails the integration of parallel layers following the final residual block of the ResNet50 architecture. The modified architectures serve as the backbone for the DeepLabV3+ network. The DeepLabV3+ with RN50D or PLA-RN50D is a powerful and effective architecture that integrates deep feature extraction, multiscale spatial information, and precise segmentation to achieve high accuracy in lesion segmentation for breast DCE-MRI images. The proposed technique is tested on a QIN Breast DCE-MRI dataset comprising 233 images sourced from The Cancer Image Archive. The proposed method achieves a dice score of 0.92. The superior segmentation performance of DeepLabV3+ with PLA-RN50, as compared to its counterparts using ResNet18 and ResNet50, highlights the impactful modifications incorporated in PLA-RN50 for optimizing breast tumor segmentation.