Volpara adds to patent portfolio

AuntMinnie.com staff writers

Feb 14, 2022

2020 03 10 18 26 4677 Volpara Rsna 2019 400

Breast and lung imaging software developer Volpara Health has been awarded a U.S. patent for technology designed to detect and quantify breast arterial calcifications on mammograms.

Building off Volpara's technology for quantitative breast density scoring, U.S. Patent No. 11,246,550 encompasses the use of breast tissue composition and anthropomorphic measures to create a tissue composition map that identifies breast arterial calcifications, according to the vendor. A score can then be generated to indicate the likelihood of heart disease resulting from these calcifications, Volpara said.

"Being able to quantify breast arterial calcifications has the potential to take what are often considered incidental, insignificant findings on a mammogram, and triage patients to cardiac care and interventions," Volpara CEO Ralph Highnam said in a statement.

Volpara now has 99 patents in its global patent portfolio.

(A) Free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curve for DBT-DINO and DINOv2 (Meta AI) on the detection task. DINOv2 achieved higher sensitivity than DBT-DINO across most false-positive thresholds. (B) Detection rates of DBT-DINO and DINOv2 for lesions that were ultimately found to be benign (n = 70) and lesions that were found to be cancerous (n = 66). Error bars represent 95% CIs estimated via patient-level bootstrapping with 1000 repetitions. Both models showed similar detection rates for cancerous lesions, whereas DINOv2 detected more benign lesions than DBT-DINO. (C) Example bounding box predictions for DBT-DINO and DINOv2 on the detection test set. Each image is a single two-dimensional section from a three-dimensional digital breast tomosynthesis volume; the first column shows a mediolateral oblique view, and the second and third columns show craniocaudal views. Both models struggled to detect very small lesions, such as the 3-mm-diameter lesion shown in the first column. FP = false positive.

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Images in a 70-year-old asymptomatic woman with a prior excisional biopsy in the left breast yielding lobular carcinoma in situ 3 years earlier. Screening contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM) was performed, which was considered a prevalence screen as the woman had no prior breast MRI in the past 3 years and no prior CEM. (A) Low-energy (26–30 kVp) mediolateral oblique (MLO) and (B) craniocaudal (CC) views show surgical clips but no abnormality. (C) Recombined MLO and (D) CC images show an enhancing mass in the medial left breast (arrows). Biopsy revealed invasive lobular carcinoma. Size was 0.2 cm; tumor grade II/III; negative lymph nodes; and estrogen receptor–positive, progesterone receptor–positive, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–negative.

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A normal mammogram confirmed by three-year radiologic follow-up illustrates reader-marked regions of interest (ROIs) during (A) unaided (round 1) and (B) artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted (round 2) reading. Each colored dot represents an ROI for recall by a human reader. Readers could mark more than one ROI per case, represented by multiple dots of the same color. During AI-assisted reading, the AI system displayed three visible prompts: two with suspicion of malignancy scores of 35% (left mediolateral oblique [L MLO] and craniocaudal [L CC]) and one with a suspicion of malignancy score of 10% (right craniocaudal [R CC]), shown as polygonal overlays. Without AI, six of 10 readers (60%) marked a false-positive ROI. With AI assistance, this fell to two of 10 (20%). R MLO = right mediolateral oblique.

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MRI false positive for additional disease, (top to bottom): A. Index lesion—grade 2 invasive ductal carcinoma; B. MRI lesion two, upper inner quadrant: Stromal sclerosis and columnar cell change; C. MRI lesion three, upper outer quadrant: No ultrasound correlate, no malignancy on follow-up; D. CEM marked background parenchymal enhancement with a unifocal retroareolar lesion demonstrating wash-out on delayed MLO. Images are republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

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