Act Like a Radiologist: Towards Reliable Multi-view Correspondence Reasoning for Mammogram Mass Detection

Mammogram mass detection is crucial for diagnosing and preventing the breast cancers in clinical practice. The complementary effect of multi-view mammogram images provides valuable information about the breast anatomical prior structure and is of great significance in digital mammography interpretation. However, unlike radiologists who can utilize the natural reasoning ability to identify masses based on multiple mammographic views, how to endow the existing object detection models with the capability of multi-view reasoning is vital for decision-making in clinical diagnosis but remains the boundary to explore. In this paper, we propose an Anatomy-aware Graph convolutional Network (AGN), which is tailored for mammogram mass detection and endows existing detection methods with multi-view reasoning ability. The proposed AGN consists of three steps. Firstly, we introduce a Bipartite Graph convolutional Network (BGN) to model the intrinsic geometric and semantic relations of ipsilateral views. Secondly, considering that the visual asymmetry of bilateral views is widely adopted in clinical practice to assist the diagnosis of breast lesions, we propose an Inception Graph convolutional Network (IGN) to model the structural similarities of bilateral views. Finally, based on the constructed graphs, the multi-view information is propagated through nodes methodically, which equips the features learned from the examined view with multi-view reasoning ability. Experiments on two standard benchmarks reveal that AGN significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art performance. Visualization results show that AGN provides interpretable visual cues for clinical diagnosis.

Object Instance Mining for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) using only image-level annotations has attracted growing attention over the past few years. Existing approaches using multiple instance learning easily fall into local optima, because such mechanism tends to learn from the most discriminative object in an image for each category. Therefore, these methods suffer from missing object instances which degrade the performance of WSOD. To address this problem, this paper introduces an end-to-end object instance mining (OIM) framework for weakly supervised object detection. OIM attempts to detect all possible object instances existing in each image by introducing information propagation on the spatial and appearance graphs, without any additional annotations. During the iterative learning process, the less discriminative object instances from the same class can be gradually detected and utilized for training. In addition, we design an object instance reweighted loss to learn larger portion of each object instance to further improve the performance. The experimental results on two publicly available databases, VOC 2007 and 2012, demonstrate the efficacy of proposed approach.