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Notes:
The amount of fibroglandular tissue content in the breast as
estimated mammographically, commonly referred to as breast percent
density (PD%), is one of the most significant risk factors for
developing breast cancer. Approaches to quantify breast density
commonly focus on either semiautomated methods or visual
assessment, both of which are highly subjective. This software
package was developed to be a fully-automated density estimation
method that works on both raw (i.e., "FOR PROCESSING") and vendor
postprocessed (i.e., "FOR PRESENTATION") digital mammography
images,and has thus far been validated to work on GE Healthcare and
Hologic digital mammography systems*.
Briefly, the software first applies an edge-detection algorithm to
delineate the boundary of the breast and the boundary of the
pectoral muscle. Following the segmentation of the breast, an
adaptive multi-class fuzzy c-means algorithm is applied to identify
and partition the mammographic breast tissue area, into multiple
regions (i.e., clusters) of similar intensity. These clusters are
then aggregated by a support-vector machine classifier to a final
dense tissue area, segmentation. The ratio of the segmented
absolute dense area to the total breast area is then used to obtain
a measure of breast percent density (PD%).
The software generates both quantitative estimates of breast area,
dense area and PD% that are stored in a comma separated text file
(.csv, openable by Excel) as well as a .JPG image of the breast and
density segmentations overlaid on a window-levelled version of the
mammogram amenable for publication to a user-defined directory, in
addition to several optional files, as described in the Manual
Section.
* DISCLAIMER: Density estimation on mammograms from other vendors
has not been validated, therefore the performance and the quality
of segmentation is not guaranteed. However the breast segmentation
algorithm within LIBRA generally works well across all vendors and
thus may be of general use in a research context.ust against
markers, clips and calcifications that are of high intensity in
mammograms.
Changes:
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