Comparative study of contrast-enhanced ultrasound qualitative and quantitative analysis for identifying benign and malignant breast tumor lumps.

Background: To compare the value of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) qualitative and quantitative analysis in the identification of breast tumor lumps.

Materials And Methods: Qualitative and quantitative indicators of CEUS for 73 cases of breast tumor lumps were retrospectively analyzed by univariate and multivariate approaches. Logistic regression was applied and ROC curves were drawn for evaluation and comparison.

Results: The CEUS qualitative indicator-generated regression equation contained three indicators, namely enhanced homogeneity, diameter line expansion and peak intensity grading, which demonstrated prediction accuracy for benign and malignant breast tumor lumps of 91.8%; the quantitative indicator-generated regression equation only contained one indicator, namely the relative peak intensity, and its prediction accuracy was 61.5%. The corresponding areas under the ROC curve for qualitative and quantitative analyses were 91.3% and 75.7%, respectively, which exhibited a statistically significant difference by the Z test (P<0.05).

Conclusions: The ability of CEUS qualitative analysis to identify breast tumor lumps is better than with quantitative analysis.