Correlation between superb microvascular imaging and pathological microvessel density in breast tumors

Abstract

Background: To compare the difference in the vascularity of benign and malignant breast tumors detected by superb microvascular imaging (SMI) and color Doppler flow imaging (CDFI) and analyze the potential correlations of their findings with the microvessel density (MVD) of tumors. Methods: A total of 79 women patients with 88 lesions (48 benign and 40 malignant) were included. SMI and CDFI were used to detect vascularity of breast masses according to Adler’s grading criteria. The Kappa analysis was used to assess the consistency. The anti-CD34 immunohistochemical staining was performed on postoperative specimens to detect the MVD expression in the tumors. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to analyze the correlation between MVD expression and the Adler grades of SMI and CDFI. Results: The consistency of SMI and CDFI was unfavorable for all tumors (κ=0.67), poor for malignant tumors (κ=0.39), and favorable for benign tumors (κ=0.79). Compared with CDFI, SMI had significantly positive correlation with MVD (r=0.82, P Conclusions: SMI has better detection ability of the MVD of breast malignant tumors than CDFI and is significantly correlated with MVD. Thus, SMI can be used as a non-invasive method for evaluating MVD of breast malignant tumors before surgery.