Comparison of mammographic parenchymal patterns of normal subjects and breast cancer patients

In this study, we compared the texture features of mammographic parenchymal patterns (MPPs) of normal subjects and breast cancer patients and evaluated whether a texture classifier can differentiate their MPPs. The breast image was first segmented from the surrounding image background by boundary detection. Regions of interest (ROIs) were extracted from the segmented breast area in the retroareolar region on the cranio-caudal (CC) view mammograms. A mass set (MS) of ROIs was extracted from the mammograms with cancer, but ROIs overlapping with the mass were excluded. A contralateral set (CS) of ROIs was extracted from the contralateral mammograms. A normal set (NS) of ROIs was extracted from one CC view mammogram of the normal subjects. Each data set was randomly separated into two independent subsets for 2-fold cross-validation training and testing. Texture features from run-length statistics (RLS) and newly developed region-size statistics (RSS) were extracted to characterize the MPP of the breast. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was performed to compare the MPP difference in each of the three pairs: MS-vs-NS, CS-vs-NS, and MS-vs-CS. The Az values for the three pairs were 0.79, 0.73, and 0.56, respectively. These results indicate that the MPPs of the contralateral breast of breast cancer patients exhibit textures comparable to that of the affected breast and that the MPPs of cancer patients are different from those of normal subjects.

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