Measures of angular spread and entropy for the detection of architectural distortion in prior mammograms

Architectural distortion is an important sign of early breast cancer. We present methods for computer-aided detection of architectural distortion in mammograms acquired prior to the diagnosis of breast cancer in the interval between scheduled screening sessions.

Potential sites of architectural distortion were detected using node maps obtained through the application of a bank of Gabor filters and linear phase portrait modeling. A total of 4,224 regions of interest (ROIs) were automatically obtained from 106 prior mammograms of 56 interval-cancer cases, including 301 true-positive ROIs, and from 52 mammograms of 13 normal cases. Each ROI was represented by three types of entropy measures of angular histograms composed with the Gabor magnitude response, angle, coherence, orientation strength, and the angular spread of power in the Fourier spectrum, including Shannon's entropy, Tsallis entropy for nonextensive systems, and Rényi entropy for extensive systems.

Using the entropy measures with stepwise logistic regression and the leave-one-patient-out method for feature selection and cross-validation, an artificial neural network resulted in an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.75. Free-response receiver operating characteristics indicated a sensitivity of 0.80 at 5.2 false positives (FPs) per patient.

The proposed methods can detect architectural distortion in prior mammograms taken 15 months (on the average) before clinical diagnosis of breast cancer, with a high sensitivity and a moderate number of FPs per patient. The results are promising and may be improved with additional features to characterize subtle abnormalities and larger databases including prior mammograms.