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Updated: May 9, 2026
Clinical Imaging of Microwave Mammography
Published on: November 14, 2025
Imperfect correlation of mammographic and clinical breast tissue density
Sadaf Alipour1, Leila Bayani, Azin Saberi
1Surgery Department, Arash Women's Hospital, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. sadafalipour@yahoo.com
Background:
Clinicians determine degree of mammographic density based on tissue firmness on breast examination. The study aimed to compare breast density in mammography and clinical breast examination.
Materials And Methods:
Six-hundred sixty three women 40 years of age or older were studied. The breast exam density was graded from 1 to 4 by two expert surgeons and the mammographic parenchymal density by two expert radiologists. Then for practical reasons, grades 1 and 2 were considered as low-density and grades 3 and 4 as high-density.
Results:
High and low densities were detected in 84.5% and 15.5% of clinical breast examinations and 59.7% and 40.3% of mammographies, respectively. The statistical analysis showed a significant difference between the breast tissue densities in breast examination with those in mammography.
Conclusions:
A clinically dense breast does not necessarily imply a dense mammographic picture.
