New Quantitative Imaging Markers to Predict Breast Cancer Risk in Women

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide. As early-stage breast cancer is curable and early detection methods like screening mammography can improve overall survival, screening is generally available in many countries. Screening is generally offered to women over 50 because the risk assessment models while performing well at the population level, do not accurately predict risk at an individual level. Unlike many genetic biomarkers (e.g., BRCA1/2) and epidemiology factors, which are fixed numbers, radiographic image features or patterns in mammograms change as suspicious breast abnormalities start to develop in the breast. Thus, the Ultimate Goal of This Project is to develop new image feature analysis-based clinical markers to more accurately identify women who have a higher risk of developing breast cancer.

* Project Leader