Temporal breast cancer risk assessment based on higher-order textons

Higher-order texture features from 100 mammographic images with known cancer were compared to texture features from 100 images from women with no known cancer. Texture features from images of the same breasts from screening rounds two and four years previously were also compared. The A_z score for classifying cancer images from non-cancer images was 0.749. The A _z score for classification two years previous to detection of cancer was 0.674 and the score for four years previous was 0.601. There was no signicant difference between classifying images from the round in which cancer was actually detected and the screening rounds two and four years previous. Similar results were obtained if the breast with no known cancer (contralateral breast) was used instead the breast with cancer, leading to the conclusion that texture alone has moderate predictive power regarding breast cancer risk and that this predictive value is roughly constant in the four years prior to mammographically apparent cancer.