Abstract
Breast density is a key component of risk assessment for personalised screening, necessitating robust, repeatable measures. The Standard Attenuation Rate (SAR) enables the quantification of breast tissue radiodensity at each pixel, relative to the attenuation of a reference material, so may be used as a measure of volumetric breast density. A major complication is quantification of tissue in the periphery of the breast, the (often substantial) region between the skin boundary and the point at which the breast occupies the entire distance between the plates, since the thickness is governed by the shape of the compressed breast, rather than the separation of the plates. We present a method to measure the compressed shape from the image, hence the thickness at each point in the periphery. The method exploits the vastly different attenuation of the various breast tissues from that of air, and uses spatial smoothing to glean a signal estimating solely the underlying thickness. An iterative refinement procedure allows for variation in scatter in the periphery arising from the air boundary edge effects. The outcome of the inclusion of the periphery in breast density quantified by this method is analysed, and the importance of this region’s inclusion illustrated.
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References
Schousboe, J.T., et al.: Personalizing mammography by breast density and other risk factors for breast cancer: analysis of health benefits and cost-effectiveness. Ann. Intern. Med. 155, 10–20 (2011)
Tromans, C.: DPhil Thesis: Measuring Breast Density from X-Ray Mammograms. DPhil Thesis, Engineering Science. Oxford University (October 2006)
Tromans, C.E., Brady, S.M.: The Standard Attenuation Rate for Quantitative Mammography. In: MartĂ, J., Oliver, A., Freixenet, J., MartĂ, R. (eds.) IWDM 2010. LNCS, vol. 6136, pp. 561–568. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Tromans, C., Brady, S.M. (2012). Inferring the Breast Periphery from an Image When Measuring Volumetric Breast Density. In: Maidment, A.D.A., Bakic, P.R., Gavenonis, S. (eds) Breast Imaging. IWDM 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7361. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31271-7_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31271-7_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31270-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31271-7
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