Breast Ultrasound :  The New Wave

Worldwide, breast cancer has the highest incidence of all cancers in women and has a mortality rate in developed countries of 25%.

X-ray mammography is the “Gold Standard” used to detect breast cancers. It has a sensitivity (probability that the test indicates a potential abnormality) of about 80%. However, this sensitivity decreases significantly when imaging dense breasts. Mammography has some limitations.  For example, low mammography specificity (probability that the test provides better characterization) often leads to unnecessary biopsies.

Other imaging techniques also have limiting factors. MRI exams have a very high sensitivity but only a moderate specificity. MRI is an expensive imaging modality and not readily available in all hospitals and clinics. Ultrasound has a higher specificity than mammography but has the disadvantages of being user skill dependent and having varying results based on the quality of the system used.

Breast lesions that are detected by mammography, ultrasound or MRI can be classified following the American College of Radiology standards named BI-RADS®. This classification takes into account different semiological criteria and scales them 1 to 6 (from benign to malignant).  Adding criteria to the BI-RADS® classification could help refine diagnosis. As it is common knowledge that tissue elasticity is related to pathology, tissue elasticity could be one of these parameters.

ShearWave™ Elastography, associated with conventional B-mode ultrasound, assists in characterizing the differences in tissue elasticity.

This « New Wave » in ultrasound, using UltraFast™ imaging, creates a totally different Elastography imaging technique for the breast.  Today, only ShearWave™ Elastography is capable of measuring true tissue elasticity in a reproducible and user-independent manner.

 

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