Diagnostic Performance of Sonoelastography in Addition to Ultrasound in Investigating Breast Lesions: Can Concomitant Use of These Techniques Lead to Improvement of Differentiation

Background: Sonoelastography (SE) is introduced as a complementary technique for ultrasoungraohy (US) to evaluate breast lesions. This method is based on tissue strain in response to compression and decompression. The current study was designed to investigate the diagnostic performance of SE for differentiating between benign and malignant breast lesions

Methods: A total of 35 women with 45 breast lesions who were referred to a university affiliated hospital in Tehran were enrolled. All patients were visited and examined by a same radiologist. A five-point scale was applied for categorizing lesions in SE as malignant or benign. The results of US and SE were compared with histopathological results to calculate sensitivity and specificity of each mentioned techniques.

Results: Histopathological evaluations in 12 cases were in favor of malignancy, and the rest of cases were classified as benign. The sensitivity and specificity for US were 100% and 69.7%, respectively. On other hand, SE obtained a lower sensitivity (58.3%) and higher specificity (90.9%) in comparison with US.

Conclusions: simultaneous evaluation of suspicious breast lesions with both US and SE can have high sensitivity and specificity and prevent the unnecessary invasive interventions.