AEGIS: A Multi-Task Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Mammography

Scott Chase Waggener, Sai Karthik Navuluru, Lakshman Tamil

We present Aegis, a joint-embedding predictive architecture for breast cancer detection and density assessment in mammography. We train three Vision Transformer variants (Small/Base/Large) using self-supervised joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) pre-training on 71,103 studies from 14 clinical sites, followed by supervised fine-tuning with progressive resolution scaling up to 2048x1536. On a curated 785-study test set, our largest model achieves area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) 0.949 for breast cancer triage with 93% sensitivity and 75% specificity at the optimal operating point. An ensemble combining our model with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-cleared baseline further improves discrimination to 0.952 AUC. For breast density classification, the model achieves 0.953 AUC for binary (dense vs. non-dense) classification and 62.6% exact accuracy across four Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categories, with 98.8% adjacent accuracy comparable to reported human inter-reader agreement. External validation on the public VinDr-Mammo dataset provides evidence of cross-population transfer under a different reference standard, with the largest model achieving 0.871 AUC for triage in a zero-shot setting.