Development of a transferring GAN based CAD scheme for breast mass classification: an initial study

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) scheme to facilitate breast mass classification, which is based on the latest transferring generative adversarial networks (GAN) technology. Although GAN is one of the most popular techniques for image augmentation, it requires a relatively large original dataset to achieve satisfactory results, which may not be available for most of the medical imaging tasks. To address this challenge, we developed a novel transferring GAN, which was built based on the deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGAN). This novel model was first pre-trained on a dataset of non-mass mammogram patches. Then the generator and the discriminator were fine-tuned on the mass dataset. A supervised loss was integrated with the discriminator, such that it can be used to directly classify the benign/malignant masses. We retrospectively assembled a total of 25,000 non-mass patches and 1024 mass images to assess this model, using classification accuracy and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The results demonstrated that our proposed approach improved the accuracy and area under the ROC curve (AUC) by 6.0% and 3.5% respectively, when compared with the classifiers trained without conventional data augmentation. This investigation may provide a new perspective for researchers to effectively train the GAN models on medical imaging tasks with limited datasets.