Visualizing the Invisible: Enhancing Radiologist Performance in Breast Mammography via Task-Driven Chromatic Encoding

Abstract

Purpose:Mammography screening is less sensitive in dense breasts, where tissue overlap and subtle findings increase perceptual difficulty. We present MammoColor, an end-to-end framework with a Task-Driven Chromatic Encoding (TDCE) module that converts single-channel mammograms into TDCE-encoded views for visual augmentation. Materials and Methods:MammoColor couples a lightweight TDCE module with a BI-RADS triage classifier and was trained end-to-end on VinDr-Mammo. Performance was evaluated on an internal test set, two public datasets (CBIS-DDSM and INBreast), and three external clinical cohorts. We also conducted a multi-reader, multi-case (MRMC) observer study with a washout period, comparing (1) grayscale-only, (2) TDCE-only, and (3) side-by-side grayscale+TDCE. Results:On VinDr-Mammo, MammoColor improved AUC from 0.7669 to 0.8461 (P=0.004). Gains were larger in dense breasts (AUC 0.749 to 0.835). In the MRMC study, TDCE-encoded images improved specificity (0.90 to 0.96; P=0.052) with comparable sensitivity. Conclusion:TDCE provides a task-optimized chromatic representation that may improve perceptual salience and reduce false-positive recalls in mammography triage.