Mammographic Breast Density Assessed with Fully Automated Method and its Risk for Breast Cancer

We evaluated the association between breast cancer and breast density (BD) measured using fully automated software. We also evaluated the performance of cancer risk models such as only clinical risk factors, density related measures, and both clinical risk factors and density-related measures for determining cancer risk.

This is a retrospective case-control study. The data were collected from August 2015 to December 2018. Two hundred fifty women with breast cancer and 400 control subjects were included in this study. We evaluated the BD qualitatively using breast imaging-reporting and data system density and quantitatively using 3D slicer. We also collected clinical factors such as age, familial history of breast cancer, menopausal status, number of births, body mass index, and hormonal replacement therapy use. We calculated the odds ratio (OR) for BD to determine the risk of breast cancer. We performed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to assess the performance of cancer risk models.

The OR for the percentage BD for second, third, and fourth quartiles was 1.632 (95% confidence intervals [CI]: 1.102-2.416), 2.756 (95% CI: 1.704-4.458), and 3.163 (95% CI: 1.356-5.61). The area under ROC curve for clinical risk factors only, mammographic density measures, combined mammographic, and clinical risk factors was 0.578 (95% CI: 0.45, 0.64), 0.684 (95% CI: 0.58, 0.75), and 0.724 (95% CI: 0.64, 0.80), respectively.

Mammographic BD was found to be positively associated with breast cancer. The density related measures combined clinical risk factors, and density model had good discriminatory power in identifying the cancer risk.