Fully automatic computer-aided mass detection and segmentation via pseudo-color mammograms and Mask R-CNN

Purpose: To propose pseudo-color mammograms that enhance mammographic masses as part of a fast computer-aided detection (CAD) system that simultaneously detects and segments masses without any user intervention. Methods: The proposed pseudo-color mammograms, whose three channels contain the original grayscale mammogram and two morphologically enhanced images, are used to provide pseudo-color contrast to the lesions. The morphological enhancement 'sifts' out the mass-like mammographic patterns to improve detection and segmentation. We construct a fast, fully automated simultaneous mass detection and segmentation CAD system using the colored mammograms as inputs of transfer learning with the Mask R-CNN which is a state-of-the-art deep learning framework. The source code for this work has been made available online. Results: Evaluated on the publicly available mammographic dataset INbreast, the method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by achieving an average true positive rate of 0.90 at 0.9 false positive per image and an average Dice similarity index for mass segmentation of 0.88, while taking 20.4 seconds to process each image on average. Conclusions: The proposed method provides an accurate, fully-automatic breast mass detection and segmentation result in less than half a minute without any user intervention while outperforming state-of-the-art methods.