Role of Ultrasound Elastography in the Assessment of Inflammatory Breast Lesions

Abstract

Summary and Conclusion Inflammatory breast disorders are very common clinical complaint which occur in both lactating and non-lactating women of all age groups. There are many types of inflammatory breast disorders range from benign up to malignant forms and it remains a challenge to distinguish acute mastitis from malignancy, especially form inflammatory breast carcinoma (IBC), by clinical or imaging features. Which is very important to distinguish between them because of the big differences in prognosis, and treatment of each one. US is an operator dependent that needs experienced radiologists and good equipment to avoid misinterpretation of the lesions, and to decrease the number of false positive and false negative results.Therefore we need an additional diagnostic tools to overcome this limitation, like contrast enhanced ultrasound, three –D ultrasound, and elastography. Our study was an observational prospective study that that included 40 patients presented at women imaging unit of El Dmerdash hospital ,Ain Shams university. In our study we verified the role of ultrasound Elastography in the assessment of inflammatory breast disorders as an additive tool to conventional ultrasound and its capability in differentiating benign from malignant inflammatory lesions, we find that the strain ratio cut of value was 4.05 with 100%sensitivty 82.8% specificty and 85% accuracy. While the sensitivty ,specificty, PPV,NPV and accuracy of the combined ultrasound and elastography were 100%, 81.8%,45.5%,100% and 84.2% respictevly which were more than the convintional ultrasound alone.