Repository logo
 

BGM-Net: Boundary-Guided Multiscale Network for Breast Lesion Segmentation in Ultrasound.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Change log

Authors

Wu, Yunzhu 
Zhang, Ruoxin 
Zhu, Lei 
Wang, Weiming 
Wang, Shengwen 

Abstract

Automatic and accurate segmentation of breast lesion regions from ultrasonography is an essential step for ultrasound-guided diagnosis and treatment. However, developing a desirable segmentation method is very difficult due to strong imaging artifacts e.g., speckle noise, low contrast and intensity inhomogeneity, in breast ultrasound images. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel boundary-guided multiscale network (BGM-Net) to boost the performance of breast lesion segmentation from ultrasound images based on the feature pyramid network (FPN). First, we develop a boundary-guided feature enhancement (BGFE) module to enhance the feature map for each FPN layer by learning a boundary map of breast lesion regions. The BGFE module improves the boundary detection capability of the FPN framework so that weak boundaries in ambiguous regions can be correctly identified. Second, we design a multiscale scheme to leverage the information from different image scales in order to tackle ultrasound artifacts. Specifically, we downsample each testing image into a coarse counterpart, and both the testing image and its coarse counterpart are input into BGM-Net to predict a fine and a coarse segmentation maps, respectively. The segmentation result is then produced by fusing the fine and the coarse segmentation maps so that breast lesion regions are accurately segmented from ultrasound images and false detections are effectively removed attributing to boundary feature enhancement and multiscale image information. We validate the performance of the proposed approach on two challenging breast ultrasound datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Description

Keywords

boundary-guided feature enhancement, breast lesion segmentation, deep learning, multiscale image analysis, ultrasound image segmentation

Journal Title

Front Mol Biosci

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2296-889X
2296-889X

Volume Title

8

Publisher

Frontiers Media SA