November 22, 2024
Ahmad Keshavarz

Ahmad Keshavarz

Academic Rank: Associate professor
Address:
Degree: Ph.D in Electrical engineering- Communication system
Phone: 09173731896
Faculty: Faculty of Intelligent Systems and Data Science

Research

Title Multi-modal classification of breast cancer lesions in Digital Mammography and contrast enhanced spectral mammography images
Type Article
Keywords
Deep Learning; Neural Networks
Journal COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.109266
Researchers Narjes Bouzarjomehri (First researcher) , mohammad barzegar (Second researcher) , Habib Rostami (Third researcher) , Ahmad Keshavarz (Fourth researcher) , Ahmad Navid Asghari (Fifth researcher) , Saeed Talatian Azad (Not in first six researchers)

Abstract

Breast cancer ranks as the second most prevalent cancer in women, recognized as one of the most dangerous types of cancer, and is on the rise globally. Regular screenings are essential for early-stage treatment. Digital mammography (DM) is the most recognized and widely used technique for breast cancer screening. Contrast-Enhanced Spectral Mammography (CESM or CM) is used in conjunction with DM to detect and identify hidden abnormalities, particularly in dense breast tissue where DM alone might not be as effective. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of each modality (CM, DM, or both) in detecting breast cancer lesions using deep learning methods. We introduce an architecture for detecting and classifying breast cancer lesions in DM and CM images in Craniocaudal (CC) and Mediolateral Oblique (MLO) views. The proposed architecture (JointNet) consists of a convolution module for extracting local features, a transformer module for extracting long-range features, and a feature fusion layer to fuse the local features, global features, and global features weighted based on the local ones. This significantly enhances the accuracy of classifying DM and CM images into normal or abnormal categories and lesion classification into benign or malignant. Using our architecture as a backbone, three lesion classification pipelines are introduced that utilize attention mechanisms focused on lesion shape, texture, and overall breast texture, examining the critical features for effective lesion classification. The results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform their components in classifying images as normal or abnormal and mitigate the limitations of independently using the transformer module or the convolution module. An ensemble model is also introduced to explore the effect of each modality and each view to increase our baseline architecture's accuracy. The results demonstrate superior performance compared with other similar works. The best performance on DM images