Classifying Mammographic Breast Density by Residual Learning

Abstract: Mammographic breast density, a parameter used to describe the proportion of breast tissue fibrosis, is widely adopted as an evaluation characteristic of the likelihood of breast cancer incidence. In this study, we present a radiomics approach based on residual learning for the classification of mammographic breast densities. Our method possesses several encouraging properties such as being almost fully automatic, possessing big model capacity and flexibility. It can obtain outstanding classification results without the necessity of result compensation using mammographs taken from different views. The proposed method was instantiated with the INbreast dataset and classification accuracies of 92.6% and 96.8% were obtained for the four BI-RADS (Breast Imaging and Reporting Data System) category task and the two BI-RADS category task,respectively. The superior performances achieved compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods along with its encouraging properties indicate that our method has a great potential to be applied as a computer-aided diagnosis tool.