Breast Ultrasound Images Augmentation and Segmentation Using GAN with Identity Block and Modified U-Net 3+

Abstract

One of the most prevalent diseases affecting women in recent years is breast cancer. Early breast cancer detection can help in the treatment, lower the infection risk, and worsen the results. This paper presents a hybrid approach for augmentation and segmenting breast cancer. The framework contains two main stages: augmentation and segmentation of ultrasound images. The augmentation of the ultrasounds is applied using generative adversarial networks (GAN) with nonlinear identity block, label smoothing, and a new loss function. The segmentation of the ultrasounds applied a modified U-Net 3+. The hybrid approach achieves efficient results in the segmentation and augmentation steps compared with the other available methods for the same task. The modified version of the GAN with the nonlinear identity block overcomes different types of modified GAN in the ultrasound augmentation process, such as speckle GAN, UltraGAN, and deep convolutional GAN. The modified U-Net 3+ also overcomes the different architectures of U-Nets in the segmentation process. The GAN with nonlinear identity blocks achieved an inception score of 14.32 and a Fréchet inception distance of 41.86 in the augmenting process. The GAN with identity achieves a smaller value in Fréchet inception distance (FID) and a bigger value in inception score; these results prove the model’s efficiency compared with other versions of GAN in the augmentation process. The modified U-Net 3+ architecture achieved a Dice Score of 95.49% and an Accuracy of 95.67%.