by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | August 04, 2014
From the July 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Right now, there is no set guidance for what a woman should do once she is notified that she has dense breasts. “What exactly does it mean to get the letter that you have dense breast — does that mean a woman should go out and seek supplemental screening?,” says Lee. “I don’t know that that has been determined.”
The traditional way to measure breast density is with the American College of Radiology’s Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). It classifies breast density in four groups from entirely fatty to extremely dense.
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Entirely fatty is when the glandular tissue is less than 25 percent of the breast, scattered fibroglandular densities is when fibrous and glandular tissue is 25 to 50 percent of the breast, heterogeneously dense means there is 51 to 75 percent of fibrous and glandular tissue found throughout the breast and extremely dense is when the breast is made up of 75 percent fibrous and glandular tissue.
The radiologist is the one who interprets how dense the woman’s breast is and interpretations may vary. In light of that, several companies have manufactured automated breast density measurement tools.
Philips Healthcare received FDA clearance on their Spectral Breast Density Measurement Application for their MicroDose SI full-field digital mammography system in December 2013. The company claims that it’s the first tool that can differentiate fat and glandular tissue to accurately measure volumetric breast density.
It independently measures the glandularity and thickness in each pixel of the mammogram image to calculate the total volume and volumetric percentage of glandular tissue. After the calculations are complete, the examination is automatically allocated a MicroDose density score that correlates to the BI-RADS.
It does all of that with photon counting technology, which sorts photons into low or high energy categories, and eliminates the need for two exposures.
iCAD Inc. and VuCOMP Inc. also have products on the market. iCAD’s Volpara uses a 3-D volumetric measurement of the dense fibroglandular tissue and the volume of the breast and produces a breast density in the range of zero to 35 percent. What they call the Volpara Density Grade maps directly to the BI-RAD categories.
Instead of using a volumetric approach, VuCOMP’s M-Vu Breast Density analyzes the structure and texture of the tissue and calculates a percentage of the breast areas that are dense and converts it to one of the four BI-RAD categories.
