Task-driven Self-supervised Bi-channel Networks Learning for Diagnosis of Breast Cancers with Mammography

Deep learning can promote the mammography-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for breast cancers, but it generally suffers from the small size sample problem. In this work, a task-driven self-supervised bi-channel networks (TSBNL) framework is proposed to improve the performance of classification network with limited mammograms. In particular, a new gray-scale image mapping (GSIM) task for image restoration is designed as the pretext task to improve discriminate feature representation with label information of mammograms. The TSBNL then innovatively integrates this image restoration network and the downstream classification network into a unified SSL framework, and transfers the knowledge from the pretext network to the classification network with improved diagnostic accuracy. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a public INbreast mammogram dataset. The experimental results indicate that it outperforms the conventional SSL algorithms for diagnosis of breast cancers with limited samples.