Two-View Mammogram Synthesis from Single-View Data Using Generative Adversarial Networks

While two-view mammography taking both mediolateral-oblique (MLO) and cranio-caudual (CC) views is the current standard method of examination in breast cancer screening, single-view mammography is still being performed in some countries on women of specific ages. The rate of cancer detection is lower with single-view mammography than for two-view mammography, due to the lack of available image information. The goal of this work is to improve single-view mammography’s ability to detect breast cancer by providing two-view mammograms from single projections. The synthesis of novel-view images from single-view data has recently been achieved using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Here, we apply complete representation GAN (CR-GAN), a novel-view image synthesis model, aiming to produce CC-view mammograms from MLO views. Additionally, we incorporate two adaptations—the progressive growing (PG) technique and feature matching loss—into CR-GAN. Our results show that use of the PG technique reduces the training time, while the synthesized image quality is improved when using feature matching loss, compared with the method using only CR-GAN. Using the proposed method with the two adaptations, CC views similar to real views are successfully synthesized for some cases, but not all cases; in particular, image synthesis is rarely successful when calcifications are present. Even though the image resolution and quality are still far from clinically acceptable levels, our findings establish a foundation for further improvements in clinical applications. As the first report applying novel-view synthesis in medical imaging, this work contributes by offering a methodology for two-view mammogram synthesis.