Multicriteria evaluation of deep neural networks for semantic segmentation of mammographies

Breast segmentation plays a vital role in the automatic analysis of mammograms. Accurate segmentation of the breast region increments the probability of a correct diagnostic and minimizes computational cost. Traditionally, model-based approaches dominated the landscape for breast segmentation, but recent studies seem to benefit from using robust deep learning models for this task. In this work, we present an extensive evaluation of deep learning architectures for semantic segmentation of mammograms, including segmentation metrics, memory requirements, and average inference time. We used several combinations of two-stage segmentation architectures composed of a feature extraction net (VGG16 and ResNet50) and a segmentation net (FCN-8, U-Net, and PSPNet). The training examples were taken from the mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. Experimental results using the mini-MIAS database show that the best net scored a Dice similarity coefficient of 99.37% for breast boundary segmentation and 95.45% for pectoral muscle segmentation.