Unsupervised anomaly detection with generative adversarial networks in mammography

Breast cancer is a common cancer among women, and screening mammography is the primary tool for diagnosing this condition. Recent advancements in deep learning technologies have triggered the implementation for the research studies via mammography. In clinical situations, where abnormal data are significantly lacking, semisupervised or unsupervised methods are often used to overcome the limitations of supervised learning such as manpower and time for labeling. Accordingly, we proposed a generative model that uses a state-of-the-art generative network (StyleGAN2) to create high-quality synthetic mammographic images and the anomaly detection method to detect breast cancer on mammograms in unsupervised methods. The generation model trained via only normal mammograms and breast cancer classification was performed via anomaly detection using 50 each breast cancer and normal mammograms that did not overlap with the dataset for generative model learning. We developed an anomaly detection method that would evaluate this method in breast cancer classification. Our generative model has shown comparable fidelity to real images, and the anomaly detection method via this generative model showed high sensitivity, demonstrating its potential for breast cancer screening. This method could differentiate between normal and cancer-positive mammogram and help overcome the weakness of current supervised methods.