Deep Neural Networks Improve Radiologists' Performance in Breast Cancer Screening

We present a deep CNN for breast cancer screening exam classification, trained and evaluated on over 200,000 exams (over 1,000,000 images). Our network achieves an AUC of 0.895 in predicting whether there is a cancer in the breast, when tested on the screening population. We attribute the high accuracy of our model to a two-stage training procedure, which allows us to use a very high-capacity patch-level network to learn from pixel-level labels alongside a network learning from macroscopic breast-level labels. To validate our model, we conducted a reader study with 14 readers, each reading 720 screening mammogram exams, and find our model to be as accurate as experienced radiologists when presented with the same data. Finally, we show that a hybrid model, averaging probability of malignancy predicted by a radiologist with a prediction of our neural network, is more accurate than either of the two separately.

Speaker bio: - Krzysztof Geras is an assistant professor at NYU School of Medicine and an affiliated faculty at NYU Center for Data Science. His main interests are in unsupervised learning with neural networks, model compression, transfer learning, evaluation of machine learning models and applications of these techniques to medical imaging. He previously did a postdoc at NYU with Kyunghyun Cho, a PhD at the University of Edinburgh with Charles Sutton and an MSc as a visiting student at the University of Edinburgh with Amos Storkey. His BSc is from the University of Warsaw.

• Nan Wu is a PhD student at NYU Center for Data Science. She is interested in data science with application to healthcare and currently working on medical image analysis. Before joining NYU, she graduated from School for Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China, receiving B.S in Statistics and B.A. in Business Administration.