A multitask deep learning method in simultaneously predicting occult invasive disease in ductal carcinoma in-situ and segmenting microcalcifications in mammography

We proposed a two-branch multitask learning convolutional neural network to solve two different but related tasks at the same time. Our main task is to predict occult invasive disease in biopsy proven Ductal Carcinoma in-situ (DCIS), with an auxiliary task of segmenting microcalcifications (MCs). In this study, we collected digital mammography from 604 patients, 400 of which were DCIS. The model used patches with size of 512×512 extracted within a radiologist masked ROIs as input, with outputs including noisy MC segmentations obtained from our previous algorithms, and classification labels from final diagnosis at patients' definite surgery. We utilized a deep multitask model by combining both Unet segmentation networks and prediction classification networks, by sharing first several convolutional layers. The model achieved a patch-based ROC-AUC of 0.69, with a case-based ROC-AUC of 0.61. Segmentation results achieved a dice coefficient of 0.49.