Quantitative assessment of breast density: comparison of different methods / 中华放射学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To Compare different methods of quantitative breast density measurement.Methods The study included sixty patients who underwent both mammography and breast MRI. The breast density was computed automatically on digital mammograms with R2 workstation. Two experienced radiologists read the mammograms and assessed the breast density with Wolfe and ACR classification respectively. Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM) was used to assess breast density on MRI. Each assessment method was repeated after 2 weeks. Spearman and Pearson correlations of inter- and intrareader and intermodality were computed for density estimates. Results Inter- and intrareader correlation of Wolfe classification were 0. 74 and 0. 65, and they were 0. 74 and 0. 82 for ACR classification respectively.Correlation between Wolfe and ACR classification was 0. 77. High interreader correlation of 0. 98 and intrareader correlation of 0. 96 was observed with MR FCM measurement. And the correlation between digital mammograms and MRI was high in the assessment of breast density (r = 0. 81, P ＜ 0. 01). Conclusion High correlation of breast density estimates on digital mammograms and MRI FCM suggested the former could be used as a simple and accurate method.