Development and validation of a deep learning model for detection of breast cancers in mammography from multi-institutional datasets

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to develop and validate a state-of-the-art, deep learning (DL)-based model for detecting breast cancers on mammography. METHODS: Mammograms in a hospital development dataset, a hospital test dataset, and a clinic test dataset were retrospectively collected from January 2006 through December 2017 in Osaka City University Hospital and Medcity21 Clinic. The hospital development dataset and a publicly available digital database for screening mammography (DDSM) dataset were used to train and to validate the RetinaNet, one type of DL-based model, with five-fold cross-validation. The model’s sensitivity and mean false positive indications per image (mFPI) and partial area under the curve (AUC) with 1.0 mFPI for both test datasets were externally assessed with the test datasets. RESULTS: The hospital development dataset, hospital test dataset, clinic test dataset, and DDSM development dataset included a total of 3179 images (1448 malignant images), 491 images (225 malignant images), 2821 images (37 malignant images), and 1457 malignant images, respectively. The proposed model detected all cancers with a 0.45–0.47 mFPI and had partial AUCs of 0.93 in both test datasets. CONCLUSIONS: The DL-based model developed for this study was able to detect all breast cancers with a very low mFPI. Our DL-based model achieved the highest performance to date, which might lead to improved diagnosis for breast cancer.