Abstract
BackgroundThis study prospectively investigates the agreement between radial (r-US) and meander-like (m-US) breast ultrasound with regard to lesion location, lesion size, morphological characteristics and final BI-RADS classification of individual breast lesions.MethodsEach patient of a consecutive, unselected, mixed collective received a dual ultrasound examination.ResultsThe agreement between r-US and m-US for lesion location ranged from good (lesion to mammilla distance ICC 0.64; lesion to skin distance ICC 0.72) to substantial (clock-face localization κ 0.70). For lesion size the agreement was good (diameter ICC 0.72; volume ICC 0.69), for lesion margin and architectural distortion it was substantial (κ 0.68 and 0.70, respectively). Most importantly, there was a substantial agreement (κ 0.76) in the final BI-RADS classification between r-US and m-US.ConclusionsOur recent comparison of radial and meander-like breast US revealed that the diagnostic accuracy of the two scanning methods was comparable. In this study, we observe a high degree of agreement between m-US and r-US for the lesion description (location, size, morphology) and final BI-RADS classification. These findings corroborate that r-US is a suitable alternative to m-US in daily clinical practice.Trial registrationNCT02358837. Registered January 2015, retrospectively registered https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=NCT02358837&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=
Highlights
This study prospectively investigates the agreement between radial (r-US) and meander-like (m-US) breast ultrasound with regard to lesion location, lesion size, morphological characteristics and final BI-RADS classifica‐ tion of individual breast lesions
The description of breast lesions is based on their sonographic features, and lesions are classified according to the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System [11]
The study revealed that the diagnostic accuracy for radial breast ultrasound (r-US) and meander-like ultrasound (m-US) is comparable as indicated by a sensitivity of 88.9% for both methods, a specificity of 86.4% for m-US and 89.4% for r-US, a positive predictive value of 64.0% for m-US and 69.6% for r-US, and a negative predictive value of 98.3% for both methods
Summary
This study prospectively investigates the agreement between radial (r-US) and meander-like (m-US) breast ultrasound with regard to lesion location, lesion size, morphological characteristics and final BI-RADS classifica‐ tion of individual breast lesions. Most publications on the agreement of breast lesion description and BI-RADS classification are based on retrospective analysis of static images [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. The agreement in describing and interpreting breast lesions in real time between radial breast ultrasound and meander-like ultrasound has not been investigated. We compared radial and meander-like scanning methods with regard to diagnostic accuracy and time used for the US examination [28]. We found a significantly shorter examination time for r-US (14.8 min) compared to m-US (22.6 min) supporting the notion that r-US is a viable alternative to m-US
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