Discrimination between breast invasive ductal carcinomas and benign lesions by optimizing quantitative parameters derived from dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI using a semi-automatic method.

Background: To propose a semi-automatic method for distinguishing invasive ductal carcinomas from benign lesions on breast dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI).

Methods: 142 cases were included. In the conventional method, the region of interest for a breast lesion was drawn manually and the corresponding mean time-signal intensity curve (TIC) was qualitatively categorized. Only one quantitative parameter was obtained: the maximum slope of increase (MSI). By contrast, the proposed method extracted the suspicious breast lesion semi-automatically. Besides MSI, more quantitative parameters reflecting perfusion information were derived from the mean TIC and lesion region, including the signal intensity slope (SI), initial percentage of enhancement, percentage of peak enhancement, early signal enhancement ratio, and second enhancement percentage. The mean TIC was categorized quantitatively according to the value of SI. Regression models were established. The diagnostic performance differed between the new and conventional methods according to the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and receiver operating characteristic analysis.

Results: According to the TIC categorization results, the accuracies of the traditional and the new method were 59.16% and 76.05%, respectively (P < 0.05). The accuracy was 63.35% for MSI, which was derived from the manual method. For the semi-automatic method, the accuracies were 81.0% and 78.9% for the lesion region and the corresponding mean TIC regression models, respectively.

Conclusions: The results demonstrate that our proposed semi-automatic method is beneficial for discriminating breast IDCs and benign lesions based on DCE-MRI, and this method should be considered as a supplementary tool for subjective diagnosis by clinical radiologists.