MGBN: Convolutional neural networks for automated benign and malignant breast masses classification

Automated benign and malignant breast masses classification is a crucial yet challenging topic. Recently, many studies based on convolutional neural network (CNN) are presented to address this task, but most of these CNN-based methods neglect the effective global contextual information. Moreover, their methods do not further analyze the reliability and interpretability of CNN models, which does not correspond to the clinical diagnosis. In this work, we firstly propose a novel multi-level global-guided branch-attention network (MGBN) for mass classification, which aims to fully leverage the multi-level global contextual information to refine the feature representation. Specifically, the MGBN includes a stem module and a branch module. The former extracts the local information through standard local convolutional operations of ResNet-50. The latter embeds the global contextual information and establishes the relationships of different feature levels via global pooling and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The final prediction is computed by local information and global information together. Then, we discuss the reliability and interpretability of our mass classification network by visualizing the coarse localization map through Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), which is important in clinical diagnosis. Finally, our proposed MGBN is greatly demonstrated on two public mammographic mass classification databases including the DDSM and INbreast databases, resulting in AUC of 0.8375 and 0.9311, respectively.