Computer-aided diagnosis for MRI screening of the Breast in high risk women

Breast MRI is currently the imaging modality with the highest sensitivity for detecting breast cancer in high risk women and and plays a significant role for evaluating the extent of disease in newly diagnosed breast cancer. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has been proposed for breast MRI as a tool to
standardize evaluation, to automate time consuming analysis, and to aid the diagnostic decision process by radiologists.

In 2011 the Ontario Breast Screening Program (OBSP) launched the high risk screening program  and started offering annual breast MRI in addition to mammography to women at high risk of developing breast cancer. Women are eligible if they have no acute breast symptoms, are 30 to 69 years of age and meet at least one of the personal and family history high risk criteria. Approximately 34000 women in Ontario will benefit from this initiative aiming at detecting earlier stage cancers, requiring less invasive treatments and archiving greater survival rates.

One problem with breast MRI screening is the high number of false-positives diagnosis (i.e women who undergo biopsy and are found to have a benign lesion) due to MRI moderate specificity. Pre-invasive cancers such as DCIS and some early stage invasive cancers are particularly problematic since they exhibit inconsistent kinetic enhancement and poorly defined boundaries. CAD systems have the ability to integrate many different image-derived signatures, some of which are difficult to assess visually, yet current CADs do not differentiate between types of enhancement to tailor the diagnosis differently. The main goal of this research is to develop a prototype CAD system that detects suspicious enhancements differentially among particular types of lesions, and presents this information to the radiologist to support evidence-based diagnosis.

Project Members

Cristina Gallego (Researcher)
Anne Martel (Principal Investigator)

Publications

Yaffe, Theo Cleland; James G. Mainprize; Olivier Alonzo-Proulx; Jennifer A. Harvey; Roberta A Jong; Anne L. Martel; Martin J.: Use of convolutional neural networks to predict risk of masking by mammographic density. SPIE Medical Imaging, 2019, Computer-Aided Diagnosis, vol. 10950, 2019. (Type: Conference | Abstract | BibTeX)
Kuling, Grey; Fashandi, Homa; Lu, YingLi; Wu, Hongbo; Martel, Anne L.: Breast Volume and Fibroglandular Tissue Segmentation in MRI using a Deep Learning Unet. ISMRM Workshop on Breast MRI: Advancing the State of the Art, 2018. (Type: Workshop | Links | BibTeX)
Wu, Hongbo: Automatic Computer Aided Diagnosis of Breast Cancer in Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Images. University of Toronto, Department Medical Biophysics , 2016. (Type: Masters Thesis | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)
Gallego, Cristina: Automatic 3D Segmentation of the Breast in MRI. University of Toronto, Medical Biophysics, 2011. (Type: Masters Thesis | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)
Levman, Jacob: Pattern Recognition Applied to the Computer-aided Detection and Diagnosis of Breast Cancer from Dynamic Contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance Breast Images. University of Toronto, 2010. (Type: PhD Thesis | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)
Levman, Jacob; Leung, Tony; Causer, Petrina; Plewes, Don; Martel, Anne L.: Classification of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance breast lesions by support vector machines. In: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging , vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 688 - 696, 2008. (Type: Journal Article | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)