Selecting the Mammographic-View for the Parenchymal Analysis-Based Breast Cancer Risk Assessment

Mammography is one of the main diagnostic tools for the breast and is increasingly utilized for breast cancer risk assessment. Recently, parenchymal analysis has emerged as a computational tool that works by extracting imaging features from mammograms in order to infer the level of risk of a patient. In standard screening mammography, two views for each breast are obtained: the cranio-caudal (CC) and the medio-lateral oblique (MLO) views. However, to the best of our knowledge, the question of whether the choice of a given view can influence the performance of parenchymal analysis has not been researched in the literature. The aim of this work is to evaluate the utilization of different views for risk estimation based on the computerized analysis of parenchymal patterns in mammography images. We implemented a parenchymal analysis method and tested it on a sample of 228 women in a retrospective case/control study. Based on the obtained results we support the use of the CC view for parenchymal analysis since this reduces computational cost without affecting performance.