Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, and a significant health issue worldwide. According to the World Health Organization’s cancer awareness recommendations, mammographic screening should be regularly performed on middle-aged or older women to increase the chances of early cancer detection. Breast density is widely known to be related to the risk of cancer development. The American College of Radiology Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System categorizes mammography into four levels based on breast density, ranging from ACR-A (least dense) to ACR-D (most dense). Computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems can now detect suspicious regions in mammograms and identify abnormalities more quickly and accurately than human readers. However, their performance is still influenced by the tissue density level, which must be considered when designing such systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method that uses CycleGANs to transform suspicious regions of mammograms from ACR-B, -C, and -D levels to ACR-A level. This transformation aims to reduce the masking effect caused by thick tissue and separate cancerous regions from surrounding tissue. Our proposed system enhances the performance of conventional CNN-based classifiers significantly by focusing on regions of interest that would otherwise be misidentified due to fatty masking. Extensive testing on different types of mammograms (digital and scanned X-ray film) demonstrates the effectiveness of our system in identifying normal, benign, and malignant regions of interest.

Breast cancer remains one of the primary causes of cancer-related deaths among women globally. Early detection via mammography is essential for improving prognosis and survival rates. However, mammogram diagnostic accuracy is severely hindered by dense breast tissue, which can obstruct potential malignancies, complicating early detection. To tackle this pressing issue, this study introduces an innovative approach that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), specifically CycleGAN and GANHopper, to transform breast density in mammograms. The aim is to diminish the masking effect of dense tissue, thus enhancing the visibility of underlying malignancies. The method uses unsupervised image-to-image translation to gradually alter breast density (from high (ACR-D) to low (ACR-A)) in mammographic images, detecting obscured lesions while preserving original diagnostic features. We applied this approach to multiple mammographic datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in diverse contexts. Experimental results exhibit substantial improvements in detecting potential malignancies concealed by dense breast tissue. The method significantly improved precision, recall, and F1-score metrics across all datasets, revealing previously obscured malignancies and image quality assessments confirmed the diagnostic relevance of transformed images. The study introduces a novel mammogram analysis method using advanced machine-learning techniques, enhancing diagnostic accuracy in dense breasts and potentially improving early breast cancer detection and patient outcomes.