The performance of ultrasound elastography in the characterization of 170 breast lesions with histologiccorrelation was evaluated in 150 consecutive patients who were diagnosed as having benign or malignant masseson B mode sonography. Each lesion was classified with ACR’s BI-RADS lexicon (benign=2 and 3, malignant 4and 5) using Ueno elastography classification scores (benign=1-3, malignant=4-5). Of the 170 lesions, 70 werehistologically malignant, and 100 were benign. Ultrasound elastography was superior in detecting breast cancer,since the accuracy (95.8%), sensitivity (98.6%), specificity (96.0%), and positive predictive values (94.5%)were higher than those of B mode sonography (90.6%, 91.4%, 90.0% and 86.5% respectively). The sensitivity(98.57%) and false discovery rate (1.1%), when both modalities were jointly used (sonography and /UE) wasbetter then those of sonography and UE singly. However, the specificity (90%) was found similar to sonography.In conclusion, ultrasound elastography is superior to B mode sonography in assessing the nature of breast lesions.
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