Analysis of the Normalized Radial Length Reveals Differences in Morphology between Hormone Receptor Positive and Negative Breast Lesions Imaged with DCE-MRI

Introduction: Several studies have investigated differences in quantitative morphological features between benign and malignant breast tumors, as assessed by dynamic contrast enhanced-MRI (DCE-MRI); however, very little information is available on the extent of such differences between certain subgroups of malignant tumors, such as hormone receptor positive and negative tumors. Such information should help to better understand and quantify the variability in morphology across malignant tumors. This abstract presents an investigation of quantitatively determined morphological features in hormone receptor positive and negative tumors. To assess the tumor surface irregularity, we have determined for each tumor measures of the intra-tumor variability of the radial length [1,2], which is the distance between a given point on the surface of the tumor and the tumor centroid. This measure is normalized by dividing by the intra-tumor mean of the radial length in order to remove the dependence on tumor volume, and is hence referred to as the normalized radial length (NRL).