AI Article Synopsis

  • The study investigates whether automated measures of breast tissue density can differentiate between cancerous and healthy breasts in women who have breast cancer compared to healthy controls.
  • Using mammogram data from 1160 cancer cases and 2360 matched controls, it was found that the cancerous breast exhibited less decrease in volumetric density over time compared to the normal breast.
  • Despite this finding, the difference in density measures was small, suggesting that these measures alone may not effectively distinguish between women with breast cancer and those without.

Article Abstract

Background: Given that breast cancer and normal dense fibroglandular tissue have similar radiographic attenuation, we examine whether automated volumetric density measures identify a differential change between breasts in women with cancer and compare to healthy controls.

Methods: Eligible cases (n = 1160) had unilateral invasive breast cancer and bilateral full-field digital mammograms (FFDMs) at two time points: within 2 months and 1-5 years before diagnosis. Controls (n = 2360) were matched to cases on age and date of FFDMs. Dense volume (DV) and volumetric percent density (VPD) for each breast were assessed using Volpara™. Differences in DV and VPD between mammograms (median 3 years apart) were calculated per breast separately for cases and controls and their difference evaluated by using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. To simulate clinical practice where cancer laterality is unknown, we examined whether the absolute difference between breasts can discriminate cases from controls using area under the ROC curve (AUC) analysis, adjusting for age, BMI, and time.

Results: Among cases, the VPD and DV between mammograms of the cancerous breast decreased to a lesser degree (- 0.26% and - 2.10 cm) than the normal breast (- 0.39% and - 2.74 cm) for a difference of 0.13% (p value < 0.001) and 0.63 cm (p = 0.002), respectively. Among controls, the differences between breasts were nearly identical for VPD (- 0.02 [p = 0.92]) and DV (0.05 [p = 0.77]). The AUC for discriminating cases from controls using absolute difference between breasts was 0.54 (95% CI 0.52, 0.56) for VPD and 0.56 (95% CI, 0.54, 0.58) for DV.

Conclusion: There is a small relative increase in volumetric density measures over time in the breast with cancer which is not found in the normal breast. However, the magnitude of this difference is small, and this measure alone does not appear to be a good discriminator between women with and without breast cancer.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6819393PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13058-019-1198-9DOI Listing

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