Algorithms and methods for computerized analysis of mammography images in breast cancer risk assessment

The computerized analysis of mammograms for the development of quantitative biomarkers is a growing field with applications in breast cancer risk assessment. Computerized image analysis offers the possibility of using different methods and algorithms to extract additional information from screening and diagnosis images to aid in the assessment of breast cancer risk. In this work, we review the algorithms and methods for the automated, computerized analysis of mammography images for the task mentioned, and discuss the main challenges that the development and improvement of these methods face today.

We review the recent progress in two main branches of mammography-based risk assessment: parenchymal analysis and breast density estimation, including performance indicators of most of the studies considered. Parenchymal analysis methods are divided into feature-based methods and deep learning-based methods; breast density methods are grouped into area-based, volume-based, and breast categorization methods. Additionally, we identify the challenges that these study fields currently face.

Parenchymal analysis using deep learning algorithms are on the rise, with some studies showing high-performance indicators, such as an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of up to 90. Methods for risk assessment using breast density report a wider variety of performance indicators; however, we can also identify that the approaches using deep learning methods yield high performance in each of the subdivisions considered.

Both breast density estimation and parenchymal analysis are promising tools for the task of breast cancer risk assessment; deep learning methods have shown performance comparable or superior to the other considered methods. All methods considered face challenges such as the lack of objective comparison between them and the lack of access to datasets from different populations.