Attention Dense-U-Net for Automatic Breast Mass Segmentation in Digital Mammogram

Breast mass is one of the most distinctive signs for the diagnosis of breast cancer, and the accurate segmentation of masses is critical for improving the accuracy of breast cancer detection and reducing the mortality rate. It is time-consuming for a physician to review the film. Besides, traditional medical segmentation techniques often require prior knowledge or manual extraction of features, which often lead to a subjective diagnosis. Therefore, developing an automatic image segmentation method is important for clinical application. In this paper, a fully automatic method based on deep learning for breast mass segmentation is proposed, which combines densely connected U-Net with attention gates (AGs). It contains an encoder and a decoder. The encoder is a densely connected convolutional network and the decoder is the decoder of U-Net integrated with AGs. The proposed method is tested on the public and authoritative database-Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) database. F1-score, mean intersection over union, sensitivity, specificity, and overall accuracy are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that dense U-Net integrated AGs achieve better segmentation results than U-Net, attention U-Net, DenseNet, and state-of-the-art methods.