Breast elastography: a hospital-based preliminary study in China.

The performance of ultrasound elastography in the characterization of 170 breast lesions with histologic correlation was evaluated in 150 consecutive patients who were diagnosed as having benign or malignant masses on B mode sonography. Each lesion was classified with ACR's BI-RADS lexicon (benign=2 and 3, malignant 4 and 5) using Ueno elastography classification scores (benign=1-3, malignant=4-5). Of the 170 lesions, 70 were histologically malignant, and 100 were benign. Ultrasound elastography was superior in detecting breast cancer, since the accuracy (95.8%), sensitivity (98.6%), specificity (96.0%), and positive predictive values (94.5%) were higher than those of B mode sonography (90.6%, 91.4%, 90.0% and 86.5% respectively). The sensitivity (98.57%) and false discovery rate (1.1%), when both modalities were jointly used (sonography and /UE) was better then those of sonography and UE singly. However, the specificity (90%) was found similar to sonography. In conclusion, ultrasound elastography is superior to B mode sonography in assessing the nature of breast lesions.