Title: Revealing Hidden Potentials of the q-Space Signal in Breast Cancer,
Abstract: Mammography screening for early detection of breast lesions currently suffers
from high amounts of false positive findings, which result in unnecessary
invasive biopsies. Diffusion-weighted MR images (DWI) can help to reduce many
of these false-positive findings prior to biopsy. Current approaches estimate
tissue properties by means of quantitative parameters taken from generative,
biophysical models fit to the q-space encoded signal under certain assumptions
regarding noise and spatial homogeneity. This process is prone to fitting
instability and partial information loss due to model simplicity. We reveal
unexplored potentials of the signal by integrating all data processing
components into a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is
designed to propagate clinical target information down to the raw input images.
This approach enables simultaneous and target-specific optimization of image
normalization, signal exploitation, global representation learning and
classification. Using a multicentric data set of 222 patients, we demonstrate
that our approach significantly improves clinical decision making with respect
to the current state of the art.