An enhanced NLP approach for BI-RADS extraction in breast ultrasound reports using deep learning

Abstract

Breast cancer stands as one of the top causes of death around the globe, making the accurate interpretation of breast ultrasound reports vital for early diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately, key findings in these reports are often buried in unstructured text, complicating automated extraction. This study presents a deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) approach to extract breast imaging reporting and data system (BI-RADS) categories from breast ultrasound data. We trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, specifically using a BiLSTM architecture, on a dataset of reports that were manually annotated from a hospital in Saudi Arabia. Our approach also incorporates uncertainty estimation techniques to tackle ambiguous cases and uses data augmentation to boost model performance. The experimental results indicate that our deep learning method surpasses traditional rule-based and machine-learning techniques, achieving impressive accuracy in classification tasks. This research plays a significant role in automating radiology reporting, aiding clinical decision-making, and pushing forward the field of breast cancer research.