Pre and Post-hoc Diagnosis and Interpretation of Malignancy from Breast DCE-MRI

Abstract: We propose a new method for breast cancer screening from DCE-MRI based on a post-hoc approach that is trained using weakly annotated data (i.e., labels are available only at the image level without any lesion delineation). Our proposed post-hoc method automatically diagnosis the whole volume and, for positive cases, it localizes the malignant lesions that led to such diagnosis. Conversely, traditional approaches follow a pre-hoc approach that initially localises suspicious areas that are subsequently classified to establish the breast malignancy -- this approach is trained using strongly annotated data (i.e., it needs a delineation and classification of all lesions in an image). Another goal of this paper is to establish the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches when applied to breast screening from DCE-MRI. Relying on experiments on a breast DCE-MRI dataset that contains scans of 117 patients, our results show that the post-hoc method is more accurate for diagnosing the whole volume per patient, achieving an AUC of 0.91, while the pre-hoc method achieves an AUC of 0.81. However, the performance for localising the malignant lesions remains challenging for the post-hoc method due to the weakly labelled dataset employed during training.