Radiomic Phenotypes of Mammographic Parenchymal Complexity: Toward Augmenting Breast Density in Breast Cancer Risk Assessment

Purpose To identify phenotypes of mammographic parenchymal complexity by using radiomic features and to evaluate their associations with breast density and other breast cancer risk factors. Materials and Methods Computerized image analysis was used to quantify breast density and extract parenchymal texture features in a cross-sectional sample of women screened with digital mammography from September 1, 2012, to February 28, 2013 (n = 2029; age range, 35-75 years; mean age, 55.9 years). Unsupervised clustering was applied to identify and reproduce phenotypes of parenchymal complexity in separate training (n = 1339) and test sets (n = 690). Differences across phenotypes by age, body mass index, breast density, and estimated breast cancer risk were assessed by using Fisher exact, χ², and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Conditional logistic regression was used to evaluate preliminary associations between the detected phenotypes and breast cancer in an independent case-control sample (76 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 158 control participants) matched on age. Results Unsupervised clustering in the screening sample identified four phenotypes with increasing parenchymal complexity that were reproducible between training and test sets (P = .001). Breast density was not strongly correlated with phenotype category (R² = 0.24 for linear trend). The low- to intermediate-complexity phenotype (prevalence, 390 of 2029 [19%]) had the lowest proportion of dense breasts (eight of 390 [2.1%]), whereas similar proportions were observed across other phenotypes (from 140 of 291 [48.1%] in the high-complexity phenotype to 275 of 511 [53.8%] in the low-complexity phenotype). In the independent case-control sample, phenotypes showed a significant association with breast cancer (P = .001), resulting in higher discriminatory capacity when added to a model with breast density and body mass index (area under the curve, 0.84 vs 0.80; P = .03 for comparison). Conclusion Radiomic phenotypes capture mammographic parenchymal complexity beyond conventional breast density measures and established breast cancer risk factors. © RSNA, 2018 Online supplemental material is available for this article. See also the editorial by Pinker in this issue.