An Investigation of Deep Learning for Lesions Malignancy Classification in Breast DCE-MRI

Dynamic Contrast Enhanced-Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) is gaining popularity as a complementary diagnostic method for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. However, due to the large amount of data, DCE-MRI can hardly be inspected without the use of a Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system. Among the major issues in developing CAD for breast DCE-MRI there is the classification of regions of interest according to their aggressiveness. For this task newer hand-crafted features are continuously proposed by domain experts. On the other hand, deep learning approaches have gained popularity in many pattern recognition tasks, being able to outperform classical machine learning techniques in different fields, by learning compact hierarchical representations of an image which well fit the specific task to solve. The aim of this work is to explore the applicability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in automatic lesion malignancy assessment for breast DCE-MRI data. Our findings show that while promising results in treating DCE-MRI can be obtained by using transfer learning, CNNs have to be carefully designed and tuned in order to outperform approaches specifically designed to exploit all the available data information.