RPD: Regional Prior Distillation for Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images

Breast cancer is the leading cause of death among women worldwide. Ultrasound imaging is an important means for the early detection of breast cancer, improving the survival rate. Due to the shortage of experienced sonographers, computer-aided systems for breast cancer recognition become particularly important. Some recent studies analyze tumor types in lesion regions but rely on predefined ROIs. Some other studies recognize cancer in the whole ultrasound image, but always suffer from the extremely variable proportion, location and quantity of the tumor lesions. In this paper, we propose a regional prior distillation (RPD) framework for breast cancer diagnosis in ultrasound images. To enhance the analysis of the tumor region, we propose an Image-Cross Attention (ICA) to fuse the predefined ROI prior information with ultrasound images and train a prior-fused model. To remove the constraint of predefined ROIs, we propose a Distribution Distillation Learning (DDL) to distill the prior-fused sample distribution from the prior-fused model into a diagnostic model, which analyzes the disease from only ultrasound images, based on the knowledge distillation paradigm of the teacher-student framework. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on multi-institutional datasets to validate the proposed RPD framework. The results demonstrate the following points. The ICA fuses regional prior information adequately, leading to a high-performance prior-fused model. The DDL distills the prior information effectively, enhancing the diagnostic model to focus on the tumor lesions. The performance of the diagnostic model surpasses that of current SOTA methods by 1.66% in accuracy and 0.64% in AUC. In addition, the diagnostic model is robust to slight perturbations and achieves good generalization performance.