Assessment of Feasibility to Use Computer Aided Texture Analysis Based Tool for Parametric Images of Suspicious Lesions in DCE-MR Mammography

Our aim was to analyze the feasibility of computer aided malignant tumor detection using the traditional texture analysis applied on two-compartment-based parameter pseudoimages of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (DCE-MR) breast image data. A major contribution of this research will be the through-plane assessment capability. Texture analysis was performed on two-compartment-based pseudo images of DCE-MRI datasets of breast data of eight subjects. The resulting texture parameter pseudo images were inputted to a feedforward neural network classification system which uses the manual segmentations of a primary radiologist as a gold standard, and each voxel was assigned as malignant or nonmalignant. The classification results were compared with the lesions manually segmented by a second radiologist. Results show that the mean true positive fraction (TPF) and false positive fraction (FPF) performance of the classifier vs. primary radiologist is statistically as good as the mean TPF and FPF performance of the second radiologist vs. primary radiologist with a confidence interval of 95% using a one-sample t-test with α = 0.05. In the experiment implemented on all of the eight subjects, all malignant tumors marked by the primary radiologist were classified to be malignant by the computer classifier. Our results have shown that neural network classification using the textural parameters for automated screening of two-compartment-based parameter pseudo images of DCE-MRI as input data can be a supportive tool for the radiologists in the preassessment stage to show the possible cancerous regions and in the postassessment stage to review the segmentations especially in analyzing complex DCE-MRI cases.