Clinical Presentation of Breast Tissue Composition Metrics

Breast tissue composition is linked to both risk of developing breast cancer as well as the sensitivity of mammography. Thus, breast tissue composition assessment is important for patient management. However, it is not clear from published work if the visualization of breast tissue composition is relevant for clinical screening or diagnosis. We investigated the usefulness of different approaches to presenting quantitative tissue composition metrics to radiologists on a review workstation to address this question. Five different display methods were used to present the tissue composition metrics, 1) a word label, 2) a number, 3) superimposed contours, 4) a histogram, and 5) all together. For the specific presentation methods, we found that the radiologists polled preferred the first two methods to methods 3) and 4). All radiologists believed that it would be useful to present accurate, quantitative tissue composition information for establishing a consistent breast tissue composition score for each patient/mammogram.