Texture and region dependent breast cancer risk assessment from screening mammograms

• Background intensity independent textures for classifying breast cancer risk.
• Local intensity texton features outperform oriented tissue structure features.
• Textures computed over the full breast outperform textures from local regions.
• The region just behind the nipple is the best local region for estimating risk.

Breast density is a known risk factor for breast cancer. Here two classes of texture features, one based on textons derived from local pixel intensity variation and one based on oriented tissue structure characteristics are measured on different regions of the breast in an effort to clarify the potential contribution of texture independent of local tissue density to estimate breast cancer risk. The region just behind the nipple is found to be the most significant local region for estimating risk, but estimates based on the entire breast perform better. Texton features are found to perform better than features based on oriented tissue structure.