Automated assessment of the composition of breast tissue revealed on tissue-thickness-corrected mammography

Abstract

OBJECTIVE. Variations in the thickness of a compressed breast and the resulting variations in mammographic densities confound current automated procedures for estimating tissue composition of breasts from digitized mammograms. We sought to determine whether adjusting mammographic data for tissue thickness before estimating tissue composition could improve the accuracy of the tissue estimates. MATERIALS AND METHODS. We developed methods for locally estimating breast thickness from mammograms and then adjusting pixel values so that the values correlated with the tissue composition over the breast area. In our technique, the pixel values are corrected for the nonlinearity of the combined charac..