Multi-Image CAD employing features derived from ipsilateral mammographic views

On mammograms, certain kinds of features related to masses (e.g., location, texture, degree of spiculation, and integrated density difference) tend to be relatively invariant, or at least predictable, with respect to breast compression, Thus, ipsilateral pairs of mammograms may contain information not available from analyzing single views separately. To demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating multi-view features into CAD algorithms, "single-image" CAD was applied to each individual image in a set of 60 ipsilateral studies, after which all possible pairs of suspicious regions, consisting of one from each view, were formed. For these 402 pairs we defined and evaluated "multi-view" features such as: 1) relative position of centers of regions; 2) ratio of lengths of region projections parallel to nipple axis lines; 3) ratio of integrated contrast difference; 4) ratio of the sizes of the suspicious regions; and 5) measure of relative complexity of region boundaries. Each pair was identified as either a "true positive/true positive" (T) pair (i.e., two regions which are projections of the same actual mass), or as a falsely associated pair (F). Distributions for each feature were calculated. A Bayesian network was trained and tested to classify pairs of suspicious regions based exclusively on the multi-view features described above. Distributions for all features were significantly different for T versus F pairs as indicated by likelihood ratios. Performance of the Bayesian network, which was measured by ROC analysis, indicates a significant ability to distinguish between T pairs and F pairs (A, = 0.82 +/- 0.03), using information that is attributed to the multi-view content. This study is the first demonstration that there is a significant amount of spatial information that can be derived from ipsilateral pairs of mammograms.