Anatomical Concept-based Pseudo-labels for Increased Generalizability in Breast Cancer Multi-center Data

Breast cancer, the most prevalent cancer among women, poses a significant healthcare challenge, demanding effective early detection for optimal treatment outcomes. Mammography, the gold standard for breast cancer detection, employs low-dose X-rays to reveal tissue details, particularly cancerous masses and calcium deposits. This work focuses on evaluating the impact of incorporating anatomical knowledge to improve the performance and robustness of a breast cancer classification model. In order to achieve this, a methodology was devised to generate anatomical pseudo-labels, simulating plausible anatomical variations in cancer masses. These variations, encompassing changes in mass size and intensity, closely reflect concepts from the BI-RADs scale. Besides anatomical-based augmentation, we propose a novel loss term promoting the learning of cancer grading by our model. Experiments were conducted on publicly available datasets simulating both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios to thoroughly assess the model's performance under various conditions.