Value of ultrasound in preoperative local staging in early breast cancer.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to determine the precision of breast ultrasound for the measurement of breast lesions compared to the histological measurement. A number of other dependent variables were also analyzed.
MATERIAL AND METHODS: 460 patients with 445 malignant lesions were examined using breast ultrasound and the lesions were measured and compared to the histologically measured size. The data was further analyzed according to histology, tumor stage, age, grading and therapy.
RESULTS: Metric comparison showed good correlation between sonography and the pathologically measured size of breast lesions, especially in tumor stage T 1 and T 2 and within ductal invasive carcinomas. Higher tumor stages lead to imprecise measurements and the histological type of lobular invasive carcinoma also results in imprecise measurements. Age and grading do not influence measurement precision.
CONCLUSION: Breast ultrasound allows precise measurement of breast lesions especially at lower tumor stages. The higher the tumor stage, the more imprecise the measurement becomes. Multivariate analysis shows no cross impact between tumor stage and histological type with respect to the quality of measurement. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.