Fully Automated Convolutional Neural Network Method for Quantification of Breast MRI Fibroglandular Tissue and Background Parenchymal Enhancement

The aim of this study is to develop a fully automated convolutional neural network (CNN) method for quantification of breast MRI fibroglandular tissue (FGT) and background parenchymal enhancement (BPE). An institutional review board-approved retrospective study evaluated 1114 breast volumes in 137 patients using T1 precontrast, T1 postcontrast, and T1 subtraction images. First, using our previously published method of quantification, we manually segmented and calculated the amount of FGT and BPE to establish ground truth parameters. Then, a novel 3D CNN modified from the standard 2D U-Net architecture was developed and implemented for voxel-wise prediction whole breast and FGT margins. In the collapsing arm of the network, a series of 3D convolutional filters of size 3 × 3 × 3 are applied for standard CNN hierarchical feature extraction. To reduce feature map dimensionality, a 3 × 3 × 3 convolutional filter with stride 2 in all directions is applied; a total of 4 such operations are used. In the expanding arm of the network, a series of convolutional transpose filters of size 3 × 3 × 3 are used to up-sample each intermediate layer. To synthesize features at multiple resolutions, connections are introduced between the collapsing and expanding arms of the network. L2 regularization was implemented to prevent over-fitting. Cases were separated into training (80%) and test sets (20%). Fivefold cross-validation was performed. Software code was written in Python using the TensorFlow module on a Linux workstation with NVIDIA GTX Titan X GPU. In the test set, the fully automated CNN method for quantifying the amount of FGT yielded accuracy of 0.813 (cross-validation Dice score coefficient) and Pearson correlation of 0.975. For quantifying the amount of BPE, the CNN method yielded accuracy of 0.829 and Pearson correlation of 0.955. Our CNN network was able to quantify FGT and BPE within an average of 0.42 s per MRI case. A fully automated CNN method can be utilized to quantify MRI FGT and BPE. Larger dataset will likely improve our model.