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SAP‐cGAN: Adversarial learning for breast mass segmentation in digital mammogram based on superpixel average pooling
Author(s) -
Li Yamei,
Zhao Guohua,
Zhang Qian,
Lin Yusong,
Wang Meiyun
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1002/mp.14671
Subject(s) - segmentation , jaccard index , artificial intelligence , dice , pooling , computer science , pattern recognition (psychology) , mammography , robustness (evolution) , deep learning , breast cancer , mathematics , statistics , medicine , cancer , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
Purpose Breast mass segmentation is a prerequisite step in the use of computer‐aided tools designed for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. However, mass segmentation remains challenging due to the low contrast, irregular shapes, and fuzzy boundaries of masses. In this work, we propose a mammography mass segmentation model for improving segmentation performance. Methods We propose a mammography mass segmentation model called SAP‐cGAN, which is based on an improved conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). We introduce a superpixel average pooling layer into the cGAN decoder, which utilizes superpixels as a pooling layout to improve boundary segmentation. In addition, we adopt a multiscale input strategy to enable the network to learn scale‐invariant features with increased robustness. The performance of the model is evaluated with two public datasets: CBIS‐DDSM and INbreast. Moreover, ablation analysis is conducted to evaluate further the individual contribution of each block to the performance of the network. Results Dice and Jaccard scores of 93.37% and 87.57%, respectively, are obtained for the CBIS‐DDSM dataset. The Dice and Jaccard scores for the INbreast dataset are 91.54% and 84.40%, respectively. These results indicate that our proposed model outperforms current state‐of‐the‐art breast mass segmentation methods. The superpixel average pooling layer and multiscale input strategy has improved the Dice and Jaccard scores of the original cGAN by 7.8% and 12.79%, respectively. Conclusions Adversarial learning with the addition of a superpixel average pooling layer and multiscale input strategy can encourage the Generator network to generate masks with increased realism and improve breast mass segmentation performance through the minimax game between the Generator network and Discriminator network.