Quantitative correlation between sonographic textural feature and histopathological components for breast cancer: preliminary results

In this study, the sonographic texture and the histopathological features of breast cancer were objectively characterized. Textural dissimilarity is demonstrated to correlate well with the corresponding histopathological components. The normalized percentage of both fibrosis area and cellular area has highly linear correlation with the textural feature of dissimilarity. The correlation coefficients are −.880 and .857, respectively. The cancerous region with increased fibrous tissues shows low textural dissimilarity and has a strong tendency of negative correlation, whereas the cancerous region with increased cellularity exhibits high textural dissimilarity and a good positive correlation. These results have not been reported so far, and they can be used to predict cellular and fibrotic portions of breast cancer for biopsy or surgery planning, disease progression monitoring, and therapeutic effect evaluation. The proposed image analysis method may also be extended to similar characterization of cancerous tissue in other applications.