Discriminating between benign and malignant breast tumors using 3D convolutional neural network in dynamic contrast enhanced-MR images

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the state-of-the-art deep learning network architectures that can be used in a range of applications, including computer vision and medical image analysis. It exhibits a powerful representation learning mechanism with an automated design to learn features directly from the data. However, the common 2D CNNs only use the two dimension spatial information without evaluating the correlation between the adjoin slices. In this study, we established a method of 3D CNNs to discriminate between malignant and benign breast tumors. To this end, 143 patients were enrolled which include 66 benign and 77 malignant instances. The MRI images were pre-processed for noise reduction and breast tumor region segmentation. Data augmentation by spatial translating, rotating and vertical and horizontal flipping is applied to the cases to reduce possible over-fitting. A region-of-interest (ROI) and a volume-of-interest (VOI) were segmented in 2D and 3D DCE-MRI, respectively. The enhancement ratio for each MR series was calculated for the 2D and 3D images. The results for the enhancement ratio images in the two series are integrated for classification. The results of the area under the ROC curve(AUC) values are 0.739 and 0.801 for 2D and 3D methods, respectively. The results for 3D CNN which combined 5 slices for each enhancement ratio images achieved a high accuracy(Acc), sensitivity(Sens) and specificity(Spec) of 0.781, 0.744 and 0.823, respectively. This study indicates that 3D CNN deep learning methods can be a promising technology for breast tumor classification without manual feature extraction.