Diagnostic performances of shear-wave elastography for identification of malignant breast lesions: a meta-analysis

Purpose To examine the performance of shear-wave elastography (SWE) for the differentiation of benign and malignant breast lesions using a meta-analysis. Materials and methods PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane library were searched for studies published up to January 2014. The references of retrieved relevant articles were reviewed to identify potential publications. Randomeffect meta-analysis was conducted to assess the overall sensitivity and specificity of SWE in the differentiation of breast lesions. Results A total of 11 articles, including 2424 patients, were included in the present meta-analysis. The summarized sensitivity and specificity of the shear wave elastography performance based on maximum elasticity were 0.93 (95 % CI 0.91-0.95) and 0.81 (95 % CI 0.78-0.83), respectively. For the mean elasticity, the summarized sensitivity and specificity were 0.94 (95 % CI 0.92-0.96) and 0.71 (95 % CI 0.69-0.74), respectively. The summarized sensitivity and specificity were 0.77 (95 % CI 0.70-0.83) and 0.88 (95 % CI 0.84-0.91) for the SD of elasticity. Conclusion SWE has a high sensitivity and specificity in the differentiation of benign and malignant breast lesions. More large and prospective studies are warranted to further examine the performance of SWE.