Intelligent Computer-Aided Model for Efficient Diagnosis of Digital Breast Tomosynthesis 3D Imaging Using Deep Learning

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is a highly promising 3D imaging modality for breast diagnosis. Tissue overlapping is a challenge with traditional 2D mammograms; however, since digital breast tomosynthesis can obtain three-dimensional images, tissue overlapping is reduced, making it easier for radiologists to detect abnormalities and resulting in improved and more accurate diagnosis. In this study, a new computer-aided multi-class diagnosis system is proposed that integrates DBT augmentation and colour feature map with a modified deep learning architecture (Mod_AlexNet). To the proposed modified deep learning architecture (Mod AlexNet), an optimization layer with multiple high performing optimizers is incorporated so that it can be evaluated and optimised using various optimization techniques. Two experimental scenarios are applied, the first scenario proposed a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) model that integrated DBT augmentation, image enhancement techniques and colour feature mapping with six deep learning models for feature extraction, including ResNet-18, AlexNet, GoogleNet, MobileNetV2, VGG-16 and DenseNet-201, to efficiently classify DBT slices. The second scenario compared the performance of the newly proposed Mod_AlexNet architecture and traditional AlexNet, using several optimization techniques and different evaluation performance metrics were computed. The optimization techniques included adaptive moment estimation (Adam), root mean squared propagation (RMSProp), and stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for different batch sizes, including 32, 64 and 512. Experiments have been conducted on a large benchmark dataset of breast tomography scans. The performance of the first scenario was compared in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, runtime, and f1-score. While in the second scenario, performance was compared in terms of training accuracy, training loss, and test accuracy. In the first scenario, results demonstrated that AlexNet reported improvement rates of 1.69%, 5.13%, 6.13%, 4.79% and 1.6%, compared to ResNet-18, MobileNetV2, GoogleNet, DenseNet-201 and VGG16, respectively. Experimental analysis with different optimization techniques and batch sizes demonstrated that the proposed Mod_AlexNet architecture outperformed AlexNet in terms of test accuracy with improvement rates of 3.23%, 1.79% and 1.34% when compared using SGDM, Adam, and RMSProp optimizers, respectively.