Automated assessment of breast tissue density in non-contrast 3D CT images without image segmentation based on a deep CNN
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes a novel approach for the automatic assessment of breast density in non-contrast three-dimensional computed tomography (3D CT) images. The proposed approach trains and uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) from scratch to classify breast tissue density directly from CT images without segmenting the anatomical structures, which creates a bottleneck in conventional approaches. Our scheme determines breast density in a 3D breast region by decomposing the 3D region into several radial 2D-sections from the nipple, and measuring the distribution of breast tissue densities on each 2D section from different orientations. The whole scheme is designed as a compact network without the need for post-processing and provides high robustness and computational efficiency in clinical settings. We applied this scheme to a dataset of 463 non-contrast CT scans obtained from 30- to 45-year-old-women in Japan. The density of breast tissue in each CT scan was assigned to one of four categories (glandular tissue within the breast <25%, 25%–50%, 50%–75%, and >75%) by a radiologist as ground truth. We used 405 CT scans for training a deep CNN and the remaining 58 CT scans for testing the performance. The experimental results demonstrated that the findings of the proposed approach and those of the radiologist were the same in 72% of the CT scans among the training samples and 76% among the testing samples. These results demonstrate the potential use of deep CNN for assessing breast tissue density in non-contrast 3D CT images.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".