Numerous studies have investigated the relation between mammographic density and breast cancer risk. These
studies indicate that women with dense breasts have a four to six fold risk increase. There is currently no gold
standard for automatic assessment of mammographic density.
In previous work two different automated methods for measuring the effect of HRT w.r.t. changes in breast
density have been presented. One is a percentage density based on an adaptive global threshold, and the other is
an intensity invariant measure, which provides structural information orthogonal to intensity-based methods. In
this article we investigate the ability to detect density changes induced by HRT for these measures and compare
to a radiologist's BI-RADS rating and interactive threshold percentage density.
In the experiments, two sets of mammograms of 80 patients from a double blind, placebo controlled HRT
experiment are used. The p-values for the statistical significance of the separation of density means, for the HRT
group and the placebo group at end of study, are 0.2, 0.1, 0.02 and 0.02 for the automatic threshold, BI-RADS,
the stripyness and the interactive threshold respectively.
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