Differential Diagnosis of Breast Lesions in Dual-Energy Contrast-Enhanced Spectral Mammography

Abstract

Background: Dual-energy contrast-enhanced spectral mammography (CESM) is one of the latest methods for breast lesions characterization, where structural and functional (i.e., vascularization) assessment are combined. Nowadays an interpretation of contrast-enhanced images is based only on the degree of contrast enhancement, but we propose a more detailed assessment of the structure of the hypervascular lesions by highlighting the contrast enhancement patterns. Purpose: To evaluate the diagnostic performance of contrast-enhanced spectral mammography (CESM) using the contrast enhancement patterns in malignant and benign lesions. Material and Methods: Study included 332 women examined from February 2018 to June 2020. The mean age of the women was 50 years. Of 428 lesions totally revealed, 172 (40.2%) were histologically verified as malignant and 256 (59.8%) as benign. We proposed 9 types of contrast enhancement patterns to describe lesions: reticular, granular, annular, diffuse-spherical, lacunar, cloud-like, heterogeneous-annular, point, cotton-like. Results: We showed that diagnostic performance of CESM increased sensitivity if an additional diagnostic feature of contrast enhancement pattern was used: sensitivity increased from 79.7% to 94.8% (p = 0.26), specificity from 82.4% to 95.3% (p = 0.013) and accuracy from 81.3 to 95.1% (p = 0.004), in comparison with using of only one feature of contrast enhancement intensity in the differential diagnosis of malignant and benign lesions. Conclusion: Thus, using contrast enhancement pattern allows to increase the efficiency of CESM in breast cancer detection.