A revisit on correlation between Tabár and Birads based risk assessment schemes with full field digital mammography

Mammographic risk assessment is used to determine the probability of a woman developing breast cancer and it plays an important role in the early detection and disease prevention within screening mammography. Tabár and Birads are two fundamentally different risk schemes, one is assessed based on mixtures of breast parenchyma and the other one is assessed based on the percentage of dense breast tissue. This paper presents findings on the correlation between these two mammographic risk assessment schemes; aspects with respect to reader experience and related inter reader variability were also investigated. As a follow up (revisit) investigation to a previously published paper, the new results have shown a strong correlation between Tabár and Birads with the highest Spearman’s correlation coefficient > 0.92 and κ = 0.86% (almost perfect agreement). The statistical results vary with readers’ mammographic reading experience, which also indicated subtle information such as that some mixture of breast parenchma (Tabár specific mammographic building blocks) may be more likely to cause inter reader variability.