Ke Nie1, Daniel Chang1, Jeon-Hor Chen1,2, Chieh-Chih Hsu2, Tzu-Ching Shih1,3, Hoanglong Nguyen1, Muqing Lin1, Orhan Nalcioglu1, Min-Ying Lydia Su1
1Tu & Yuen Center for Functional Onco-Imaging, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA; 2Department of Radiology, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan; 3Department of Medical Radiology Technology, China Medical University, Taiwan
This study investigated the effect of skin contamination in the breast density measurement by MRI. Skin has isointense signal as the fibroglandular tissue, and if not properly excluded would result in a large error. Using 50 cases with different breast sizes, we measured the volume of the skin and the breast, and built models to provide an estimate of skin volume based on breast volume. When MRI-based method will be applied to measure small change of density over time, reliability is the key to success, and the effect of skin needs to be properly handled.