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Background Axillary lymph node status is an extremely important prognostic factor in evaluating and managing recently diagnosed breast cancer patients. So, preoperative evaluation of the lymph nodes in breast cancer patients with minimally invasive methods is of significant concern. Ultrasonography is the main modality used for this purpose, with advantages including the ability to help to guide the biopsy. This study aimed to compare ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) and core needle biopsy (CNB) in their ability to detect metastatic disease in the axillary lymph nodes, as well as to estimate the accuracy of preoperative ultrasound-guided axillary lymph node biopsy for staging in patients with breast cancer. Results In total, 108 cases were included in the study, and 55.6% (60 cases) had metastases. The sensitivity for FNAC was 83.3%, and the specificity was 100%. The sensitivity for CNB was 100% and the specificity was 100%. The negative predictive value for FNAC was 81.5%, and that for CNB was 100%. The positive predictive value was 100% for both methods. Conclusions CNB biopsy shows higher sensitivity and accuracy than FNAC in the characterization of benign and malignant lymph nodes. FNAC is a suitable substitute when a smaller node is encountered, a node in an inaccessible site, or even an uncorrectable bleeding diathesis of the patient.

Background Breast cancer is the most common life-threatening cancer in women worldwide. A high number of women are going through biopsy procedures for characterization of breast masses every day and yet 75% of the pathological results prove these masses to be benign. Ultrasound (US) elastography is a non-invasive technique that measures tissue stiffness. It is convenient for differentiating benign from malignant breast tumors. Our study aims to evaluate the role of qualitative ultrasound elastography scoring (ES), quantitative mass strain ratio (SR), and shear wave elasticity ratio (SWER) in differentiation between benign and malignant breast lesions. Results Among 51 female patients with 77 histopathologically proved breast lesions, 57 breast masses were malignant and 20 were benign. All patients were examined by B-mode ultrasound then strain and shear wave elastographic examinations using ultrasound machine (Logiq E9, GE Medical Systems) with 8.5–12 MHz high-frequency probes. Our study showed that ES best cut-off point > 3 with sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPP, accuracy was 94.7%, 85%, 94.7%, 85%, 90.9%, respectively, and AUC = 0.926 at P < 0.001, mass SR the best cut-off point > 4.6 with sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPP, accuracy was 96.5%, 80%, 93.2%, 88.9%, 92.2%, respectively, and AUC = 0.860 at P < 0.001, SWER the best cut-off value > 4.9 with sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPP and accuracy was 91.2%, 80%, 92.9%, 76.2%, 93.5%, respectively, and AUC = 0.890 at P < 0.001. The mean mass strain ratio for malignant lesions is 10.1 ± 3.7 SD and for solid benign lesions 4.7 ± 4.3 SD (p value 0.001). The mean shear wave elasticity ratio for malignant lesions is 10.6 ± 5.4 SD and for benign (solid and cystic) lesions 3.6 ± 4.2 SD. Using ROC curve and Youden index, the difference in diagnostic performance between ES, SR and SWER was not significant in differentiation between benign and malignant breast lesions and also was non-significant difference when comparing them with conventional US alone. Conclusion ES, SR, and SWER have a high diagnostic performance in differentiating malignant from benign breast lesions with no statistically significant difference between them.

Insurance is a policy that eliminates or decreases loss costs occurred by various risks. Various factors influence the cost of insurance. These considerations contribute to the insurance policy formulation. Machine learning (ML) for the insurance industry sector can make the wording of insurance policies more efficient. This study demonstrates how different models of regression can forecast insurance costs. And we will compare the results of models, for example, Multiple Linear Regression, Generalized Additive Model, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest Regressor, CART, XGBoost, k-Nearest Neighbors, Stochastic Gradient Boosting, and Deep Neural Network. This paper offers the best approach to the Stochastic Gradient Boosting model with an MAE value of 0.17448, RMSE value of 0.38018and R -squared value of 85.8295.