{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,29]],"date-time":"2026-03-29T05:26:07Z","timestamp":1774761967671,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":35,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,23]],"date-time":"2023-08-23T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1692748800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Instituto Polit\u00e9cnico de Set\u00fabal, Portugal"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["J. Imaging"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Replacing lung cancer as the most commonly diagnosed cancer globally, breast cancer (BC) today accounts for 1 in 8 cancer diagnoses and a total of 2.3 million new cases in both sexes combined. An estimated 685,000 women died from BC in 2020, corresponding to 16% or 1 in every 6 cancer deaths in women. BC represents a quarter of a total of cancer cases in females and by far the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women in 2020. However, when detected in the early stages of the disease, treatment methods have proven to be very effective in increasing life expectancy and, in many cases, patients fully recover. Several medical imaging modalities, such as X-rays Mammography (MG), Ultrasound (US), Computer Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Digital Tomosynthesis (DT) have been explored to support radiologists\/physicians in clinical decision-making workflows for the detection and diagnosis of BC. In this work, we propose a novel Faster R-CNN-based framework to automate the detection of BC pathological Lesions in MRI. As a main contribution, we have developed and experimentally (statistically) validated an innovative method improving the \u201cbreast MRI preprocessing phase\u201d to select the patient\u2019s slices (images) and associated bounding boxes representing pathological lesions. In this way, it is possible to create a more robust training (benchmarking) dataset to feed Deep Learning (DL) models, reducing the computation time and the dimension of the dataset, and more importantly, to identify with high accuracy the specific regions (bounding boxes) for each of the patient\u2019s images, in which a possible pathological lesion (tumor) has been identified. As a result, in an experimental setting using a fully annotated dataset (released to the public domain) comprising a total of 922 MRI-based BC patient cases, we have achieved, as the most accurate trained model, an accuracy rate of 97.83%, and subsequently, applying a ten-fold cross-validation method, a mean accuracy on the trained models of 94.46% and an associated standard deviation of 2.43%.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/jimaging9090169","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,23]],"date-time":"2023-08-23T10:28:05Z","timestamp":1692786485000},"page":"169","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":12,"title":["An Innovative Faster R-CNN-Based Framework for Breast Cancer Detection in MRI"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"9","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5080-8049","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jo\u00e3o Nuno Centeno","family":"Raimundo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Instituto Polit\u00e9cnico de Set\u00fabal, Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Set\u00fabal, 2914-508 Set\u00fabal, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4773-5576","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jo\u00e3o Pedro Pereira","family":"Fontes","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centro ALGORITMI, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azur\u00e9m, 4800-058 Guimar\u00e3es, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4426-0002","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lu\u00eds","family":"Gonzaga Mendes Magalh\u00e3es","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centro ALGORITMI, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azur\u00e9m, 4800-058 Guimar\u00e3es, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7814-1653","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Miguel Angel","family":"Guevara Lopez","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Instituto Polit\u00e9cnico de Set\u00fabal, Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Set\u00fabal, 2914-508 Set\u00fabal, Portugal"},{"name":"Centro ALGORITMI, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azur\u00e9m, 4800-058 Guimar\u00e3es, Portugal"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,23]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"209","DOI":"10.3322\/caac.21660","article-title":"Global Cancer Statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN Estimates of Incidence and Mortality Worldwide for 36 Cancers in 185 Countries","volume":"71","author":"Sung","year":"2021","journal-title":"CA Cancer J. 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