https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01618-8
Regular Article
Classification of benign and malignant breast lesions in mammograms using dense-unified multiscale attention network and data-efficient image transformers
1
School of Computer Science Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
2
Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
3
Department of Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, School of Computing, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India
a r.karthik@vit.ac.in, karthikramamurthy1989@gmail.com
Received:
24
February
2025
Accepted:
29
March
2025
Published online:
16
April
2025
Breast cancer is a common and a serious health problem and it is the major cause of morbidity and mortality for women. Early detection of the disease is particularly challenging because abnormalities such as masses and microcalcifications exhibit subtle and diverse characteristics that are often difficult to identify in mammograms. In recent years, advancement in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning (DL), has shown to improve diagnostic accuracy and early-stage tumor detection. This study aims to improve performance of DL models by considering both masses and microcalcifications in the proposed work to classify breast cancer abnormalities. The proposed work introduces a novel dual-track network that employs a combination of dense-unified multiscale attention fusion (UMAF) track and data-efficient image transformer (DeiT). The DeiT track processes the entire image simultaneously using patch embeddings, enabling them to capture multiscale representations and dependencies across the entire image. Simultaneously, the Dense-UMAF track focuses on extracting localized features while utilizing connectivity of DenseNet architecture to enable effective feature reuse. This approach generates relevant input features through residual connections of varying lengths, thereby effectively addressing the vanishing gradient problem. The UMAF improves feature extraction by capturing multiscale information, resulting in a better representation of the input data. This dual-track architecture is specifically designed to capture the characteristics of mass and calcification abnormalities in mammograms, which display both localized features and global contextual patterns. The proposed network was evaluated on the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of Digital Database for Screening Mammography dataset, obtaining a classification accuracy of 88.69%.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
