Improved mammographic CAD performance using multi-view information: a Bayesian network framework

Mammographic reading by radiologists requires the comparison of at least two breast projections (views) for the detection and the diagnosis of breast abnormalities. Despite their reported potential to support radiologists, most mammographic computer-aided detection (CAD) systems have a major limitation: as opposed to the radiologist's practice, computerized systems analyze each view independently. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a Bayesian network framework for multi-view mammographic analysis, with main focus on breast cancer detection at a patient level. We use causal-independence models and context modeling over the whole breast represented as links between the regions detected by a single-view CAD system in the two breast projections. The proposed approach is implemented and tested with screening mammograms for 1063 cases of whom 385 had breast cancer. The single-view CAD system is used as a benchmark method for comparison. The results show that our multi-view modeling leads to significantly better performance in discriminating between normal and cancerous patients. We also demonstrate the potential of our multi-view system for selecting the most suspicious cases.