Assessing the role of quantitative analysis of mammograms in describing breast density changes in women using HRT

Abstract

We present an update of our investigations into the potential role of quantitative measures of breast density for characterising breast changes, and, in particular, changes due to Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). It has been established that long-term use of HRT can increase the risk of breast cancer, a fact that enforces the belief that objective measures of tissue density can be an important development in breast cancer image analysis. A set of 59 mammogram temporal HRT sequences (2 images per patient) were used in our experiments. The clinician’s assessment of density changes constituted the ground truth for evaluating the proposed quantitative measures of density change. The measures are based on the h _int representation of interesting tissue and their performance (agreement with the expert’s description) is also compared to the “interactive thresholding” method that has been used in the past to characterise mammographic density.