Quantitative discrimination between invasive ductal carcinomas and benign lesions based on semi-automatic analysis of time intensity curves from breast dynamic contrast enhanced MRI

BACKGROUND: Traditional subjective method for the analysis of time-intensity curves (TICs) from breast dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) presented a low specificity. Hence, a semi-automatic quantitative method was proposed and evaluated for distinguishing invasive ductal carcinomas from benign lesions. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In the traditional method, the lesion was extracted by placing a region of interest (ROI) manually. The mean curve of the TICs from the ROI was subjectively classified as one of three patterns. Only one quantitative parameter, the mean value of maximum slope of increase (MSI), was provided. In the new method, the lesion was identified semi-automatically, and the mean curve was classified quantitatively. Some additional parameters, the signal intensity slope (SI(slope)), initial percentage of enhancement (E(initial)), percentage of peak enhancement (E(peak)), early signal enhancement ratio (ESER), and second enhancement percentage (SEP) were derived from the mean curves as well as the lesion areas. Wilcoxon’s test and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were performed, and P < 0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: According to the TIC classification results, the accuracies were 59.16% for the traditional manual method and 76.05% for the new method (P < 0.05). For the mean MSI values from the manual method, the accuracy was 63.35%. For the mean TICs derived from the semi-automatic method, the accuracies were 77.47% for SI(slope), 65.24% for MSI, 58.45% for E(initial), 66.20% for E(peak), 71.83% for ESER, and 54.93% for SEP, respectively. For the lesion regions identified by the semi-automatic method, the accuracies were 73.24%, 72.54%, 58.45%, 62.68%, 64.09%, and 55.64%, respectively. CONCLUSION: Compared with traditional subjective method, the semi-automatic quantitative method proposed in this study showed a higher performance, and should be used as a supplementary tool to aid radiologist's subjective interpretation.