Systems and methods for automated volumetric mammographic density assessment

A system for automatically estimating a volumetric percent density (VPD), dense volume (DV), and non-dense volume (NDV) of at least one individual breast of a subject obtained from at least one medical image of at least one breast, the system comprising at least one processor in communication with at least one memory device, wherein the at least one processor is configured to:

• a. receive the at least one medical image, each medical image obtained from the individual breast and comprising a plurality of pixels and associated pixel coordinates and pixel values, wherein each pixel value is indicative of a density of breast tissue within the pixel;
• b. automatically determine a threshold pixel value for each medical image based on the pixel values of the plurality of pixels by performing a multi-fold cross-validation over a range of candidate threshold values and selecting the candidate threshold value with the smallest mean squared error (MSE) over all folds of the cross-validation as the threshold pixel value;
• c. classify each pixel with a pixel value greater than the threshold pixel value as a dense pixel containing dense breast tissue and the remaining pixels as non-dense pixels containing non-dense breast tissue;
• and
• d. estimate the volumetric percent density (VPD), dense volume (DV), and non-dense volume (NDV) for each medical image based on the volumes of all dense pixels and all non-dense pixels of each medical image;
• wherein automatically determining the threshold pixel value reduces the computational time required to estimate the VPD, DV, and NDV.