A Review on Automatic Mammographic Density and Parenchymal Segmentation

Table 1

Summary of representative studies using thresholding based methods for mammographic tissue segmentation. denotes correlation coefficient. Note that () largely identical studies are excluded in the list and () in case of multiple results, only the best reported results are listed.

Study	Year	Number of density categories	Modalities	Number of views	Number of images	Segmentation evaluation	Risk/density estimation accuracy
Global thresholding
Matsubara et al. [25]	2000	Fatty, mammary gland diffuseness, nonuniform high density, and high density	Digitised SFM	MLO	148	Visually assessed	90% (ratios of the four densities)
Saha et al. [26]	2001	Fatty and dense	Digitised SFM	MLO and CC	174	Visually assessed (acceptable)	N/A
Sivaramakrishna et al. [27]	2001	Fatty and dense	Digitised SFM	CC	32	Visually assessed	Spearman’s = [0.92, 0.95] (automatic-manual)
Olsén and Mukhdoomi [28]	2007	Fatty and glandular	Digitised SFM	MLO and CC	160 (MIAS + DDSM)	Visually assessed	N/A
Tzikopoulos et al. [29]	2011	Fatty and fibroglandular	Digitised SFM	MLO and CC	322 (mini-MIAS)	Visually assessed	86% (fatty, fatty-glandular, and dense-glandular)
Lu et al. [30]	2007	Fatty and dense	FFDM (raw)	CC	172	Visually assessed	intraclass = 0.94 (BI-RADS)
Ferrari et al. [31]	2000	Fatty and fibroglandular	Digitised SFM	MLO	66 (mini-MIAS)	Visually assessed (84% successful)	N/A
Ferrari et al. [32]	2004	Uncompressed-fatty, fatty, nonuniform-dense, and high-dense	Digitised SFM	MLO	84 (mini-MIAS)	Visually assessed (81% excellent or good)	N/A
El- Zaart [33]	2010	Fatty and fibroglandular	Digitised SFM	MLO	N/A	Visually assessed	N/A
Adaptive/dynamic thresholding
Zhou et al. [34]	2001	Fatty and dense	Digitised SFM	MLO and CC	260	Visually assessed (94% correct); (CC, MLO) = 0.94, 0.91 (automatic-manual)	42% (BI-RADS)
Neyhart et al. [35]	2002	Radiolucent and radiodense	Digitised SFM	MLO and CC	N/A	Visually assessed	N/A
Kim et al. [36]	2010	Fatty and dense	FFDM	MLO and CC	80	Visually assessed; = 0.99 (automated-manual)	N/A
Nickson et al. [37]	2013	Dense and fatty	Digitised SFM	CC	5919 women	Visually assessed; 41% “perfect” agreement (Cumulus-AutoDensity)	Pairwise = 0.63 (Cumulus-AutoDensity)