A Study on the Effectiveness of Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection Methods for Breast Ultrasonography

In the medical field, it is delicate to anticipate good performance in using deep learning due to the lack of large-scale training data and class imbalance. In particular, ultrasound, which is a key breast cancer diagnosis method, is delicate to diagnose accurately as the quality and interpretation of images can vary depending on the operator’s experience and proficiency. Therefore, computer-aided diagnosis technology can facilitate diagnosis by visualizing abnormal information such as tumors and masses in ultrasound images. In this study, we implemented deep learning-based anomaly detection methods for breast ultrasound images and validated their effectiveness in detecting abnormal regions. Herein, we specifically compared the sliced-Wasserstein autoencoder with two representative unsupervised learning models autoencoder and variational autoencoder. The anomalous region detection performance is estimated with the normal region labels. Our experimental results showed that the sliced-Wasserstein autoencoder model outperformed the anomaly detection performance of others. However, anomaly detection using the reconstruction-based approach may not be effective because of the occurrence of numerous false-positive values. In the following studies, reducing these false positives becomes an important challenge.