Quantitative Background Parenchymal Enhancement Estimation on Breast DCE-MRI by Measuring Relative Voxel-Wise Enhancement

Shandong Wu¹, Susan P. Weinstein², Emily F. Conant², Despina Kontos¹

Studies suggest that background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) in breast DCE-MRI is associated with an increased breast cancer risk for high-risk populations. Most previous work on BPE estimation is however, based on readers qualitative assessment. The purpose of our study is to develop a fully automated computational method for quantitative BPE estimation and optimize the related parameters to identify the BPE. We estimate BPE through identifying the enhancing voxels in the DCE-MRI images by measuring the relative voxel-wise enhancement. Our algorithm achieves high agreement with manual segmentation and could be used to standardize measures of BPE in clinical applications.