Evaluation of the performance of Contrast-Enhanced Spectral mammography in a retrospective study of a large cohort of patients/lesions.

Abstract

This article summarizes our recent retrospective study of 644 breast lesions which was carried out to accurately evaluate the performance of Contrast-Enhanced Spectral Mammography (CESM) compared to that of full-field digital mammography (FFDM), either alone or accompanied with breast ultrasound (BUS). We found that CESM significantly increased sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and accuracy with respect to both FFDM and FFDM+BUS. The diagnostic performance parameters of CESM were found to be comparable to those for breast MRI. We also found good agreement between CESM-estimated tumor size and the gold standard for tumor size determination, histopathology, although CESM tended to produce a slight overestimation of the size. We conclude that CESM provides high diagnostic performance and should be considered a useful technique for the local staging of breast cancer.