Compare and contrast: Detecting mammographic soft-tissue lesions with C2-Net

Abstract

Detecting breast soft-tissue lesions including masses, structural distortions and asymmetries is of great importance due to the high risk leading to breast cancer. Most existing deep learning based approaches detect lesions with only unilateral images. However, multi-view mammogram images provide highly related and complementary information which helps to make the clinical analysis more comprehensive and reliable. In this paper, we propose a multi-view network for breast soft-tissue lesion detection called C2-Net (Compare and Contrast, C2) that fuses information across different views. The proposed model contains the following three modules. The spatial context enhancing (SCE) module compares ipsilateral views and extracts complementary features to model lesion inherent 3D structure. The multi-scale kernel pooling (MKP) module contrasts contralateral views with added misalignment tolerance. Finally, the logic guided fusion (LGF) module fuses multi-view features by enhancing logic modeling capacity. Experimental results on both the public DDSM dataset and the in-house multi-center dataset demonstrate that the proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art performance.