Open Framework for Mammography-based Breast Cancer Risk Assessment

In recent years, several studies have established a relationship between mammographic parenchymal patterns and breast cancer risk. However, there is a lack of publicly available data and software for objective comparison and clinical validation. This paper presents an open and adaptable implementation (OpenBreast v1.0) of a fully-automatic computerized framework for mammographic image analysis for breast cancer risk assessment. OpenBreast implements mammographic image analysis in four stages: breast segmentation, detection of region-of-interests, feature extraction and risk scoring. For each stage, we provide implementations of several state-of-the-art methods. The pipeline is tested on a set of 305 full-field digital mammography images corresponding to 84 patients (51 cases and 49 controls) from the breast cancer digital repository (BCDR). OpenBreast achieves a competitive AUC of 0.846 in breast cancer risk assessment. In addition, used jointly with widely accepted risk factors such as patient age and breast density, mammographic image analysis using OpenBreast shows a statistically significant improvement in performance with an AUC of 0.876 (p<0.001). Our framework will be made publicly available and it is easy to incorporate new methods.