AUTHOR=Gerasimova-Chechkina Evgeniya , Toner Brian C. , Batchelder Kendra A. , White Basel , Freynd Genrietta , Antipev Igor , Arneodo Alain , Khalil Andre 

TITLE=Loss of Mammographic Tissue Homeostasis in Invasive Lobular and Ductal Breast Carcinomas vs. Benign Lesions

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physiology

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.660883

DOI=10.3389/fphys.2021.660883

ISSN=1664-042X

ABSTRACT=<p>The 2D wavelet transform modulus maxima (WTMM) method is used to perform a comparison of the spatial fluctuations of mammographic breast tissue from patients with invasive lobular carcinoma, those with invasive ductal carcinoma, and those with benign lesions. We follow a procedure developed and validated in a previous study, in which a sliding window protocol is used to analyze thousands of small subregions in a given mammogram. These subregions are categorized according to their Hurst exponent values (<italic>H</italic>): fatty tissue (<italic>H</italic> ≤ 0.45), dense tissue (<italic>H</italic> ≥ 0.55), and disrupted tissue potentially linked with tumor-associated loss of homeostasis (0.45 &lt; <italic>H</italic> &lt; 0.55). Following this categorization scheme, we compare the mammographic tissue composition of the breasts. First, we show that cancerous breasts are significantly different than breasts with a benign lesion (<italic>p</italic>-value ∼ 0.002). Second, the asymmetry between a patient’s cancerous breast and its contralateral counterpart, when compared to the asymmetry from patients with benign lesions, is also statistically significant (<italic>p</italic>-value ∼ 0.006). And finally, we show that lobular and ductal cancerous breasts show similar levels of disruption and similar levels of asymmetry. This study demonstrates reproducibility of the WTMM sliding-window approach to help detect and characterize tumor-associated breast tissue disruption from standard mammography. It also shows promise to help with the detection lobular lesions that typically go undetected via standard screening mammography at a much higher rate than ductal lesions. Here both types are assessed similarly.</p>