Mammographic density measured as changes in tissue structure caused by HRT

Jakob Raundahl; Marco Loog; Mads Nielsen

doi:10.1117/12.653021

10 March 2006 Mammographic density measured as changes in tissue structure caused by HRT

Jakob Raundahl, Marco Loog, Mads Nielsen

Proceedings Volume 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing; 61440G (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653021
Event: Medical Imaging, 2006, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Numerous studies have investigated the relation between mammographic density and breast cancer risk. These studies indicate that women with high breast density have a four to six fold risk increase. An investigation of whether or not this relation is causal is important for, e.g., hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which has been shown to actually increase the density. No gold standard for automatic assessment of mammographic density exists. Manual methods such as Wolfe patterns and BI-RADS are helpful for communication of diagnostic sensitivity, but they are both time consuming and crude. They may be sufficient in certain cases and for single measurements, but for serial, temporal analysis it is necessary to be able to detect more subtle changes and, in addition, to be more reproducible. In this work an automated method for measuring the effect of HRT w.r.t. changes in biological density in the breast is presented. This measure is a novel measure, which provides structural information orthogonal to intensity-based methods. Hessian eigenvalues at different scales are used as features and a clustering of these is employed to divide a mammogram into four structurally different areas. Subsequently, based on the relative size of the areas, a density score is determined. In the experiments, two sets of mammograms of 50 patients from a double blind, placebo controlled HRT experiment were used. The change in density for the HRT group, measured with the new method, was significantly higher (p = 0.0002) than the change in the control group.

Citation Download Citation

Jakob Raundahl, Marco Loog, and Mads Nielsen "Mammographic density measured as changes in tissue structure caused by HRT", Proc. SPIE 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing, 61440G (10 March 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653021

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