Detecting Abnormal Axillary Lymph Nodes on Mammograms Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of a deep convolutional neural network (dCNN) to accurately detect abnormal axillary lymph nodes on mammograms. In this retrospective study, 107 mammographic images in mediolateral oblique projection from 74 patients were labeled to three classes: (1) “breast tissue”, (2) “benign lymph nodes”, and (3) “suspicious lymph nodes”. Following data preprocessing, a dCNN model was trained and validated with 5385 images. Subsequently, the trained dCNN was tested on a “real-world” dataset and the performance compared to human readers. For visualization, colored probability maps of the classification were calculated using a sliding window approach. The accuracy was 98% for the training and 99% for the validation set. Confusion matrices of the “real-world” dataset for the three classes with radiological reports as ground truth yielded an accuracy of 98.51% for breast tissue, 98.63% for benign lymph nodes, and 95.96% for suspicious lymph nodes. Intraclass correlation of the dCNN and the readers was excellent (0.98), and Kappa values were nearly perfect (0.93–0.97). The colormaps successfully detected abnormal lymph nodes with excellent image quality. In this proof-of-principle study in a small patient cohort from a single institution, we found that deep convolutional networks can be trained with high accuracy and reliability to detect abnormal axillary lymph nodes on mammograms.

The Role of AI in Breast Cancer Lymph Node Classification: A Comprehensive Review

“…Now, we will briefly summarize the studies that used other radiological methods (CT, pet-CT, mammography) with ML/DL to diagnose metastatic lymph nodes in breast cancer patients. A proof of principle study was conducted on a small breast patient cohort (75 patients), where researchers investigated how deep convolutional neural network (dCNN) can accurately detect abnormal axillary lymph nodes on mammograms [ 41 ]. After training and validating the dCNN, it was tested on a “real-world” dataset for the presence of three different classes (breast tissue, benign lymph nodes and suspicious lymph nodes).…”