BREAST ELASTICITY IMAGING TECHNIQUES: COMPARISON OF STRAIN ELASTOGRAPHY AND SHEAR-WAVE ELASTOGRAPHY IN THE SAME POPULATION

purpose was to compare the diagnostic performances of strain elastography (SE) and shear-wave elastography (SWE) in differentiating breast lesions by combining with conventional ultrasound (US). A total of 198 patients with 203 breast lesions underwent conventional US, SE and SWE examination using MyLab 90 and Aixplorer US systems. The SE parameters were SEscore, fat-to-lesion ratio, gland-to-lesion ratio, muscle-to-lesion ratio and SEmean, and the SWE parameters were Emax, Emean, Emin and Esd. Conventional US had the best diagnostic performance, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.896. Among all SE parameters, the AUCs of SEscore, fat-to-lesion ratio and SEmean were 0.802, 0.810 and 0.833. For SWE parameters, they were 0.845, 0.746 and 0.845, respectively, for Emax, Emean and Esd. When combined with US, the sensitivity and AUC of SWE seemed to be better than those of SE (96.55% vs. 93.10%, 0.958 vs. 0.947), but no statistically significant difference existed between them. (E-mail: zhousu30@126.com) (C) 2020 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study aimed to compare the diagnostic performances of SE and SWE combined with conventional ultrasound in differentiating breast lesions. The results showed that conventional ultrasound had the best diagnostic performance. When combined with conventional ultrasound, SWE appeared to have better sensitivity and AUC compared to SE, but there was no statistically significant difference between them.