Preclinical study of diagnostic performances of contrast-enhanced spectral mammography versus MRI for breast diseases in China

PURPOSE: To evaluate diagnostic performances of CESM for breast diseases with comparison to breast MRI in China. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Sixty-eight patients with 77 breast lesions underwent MR and CESM. Two radiologists interpreted either MRI or CESM images, separately and independently. BI-RADS 1–3 and BI-RADS 4–5 were classified into the suspicious benign and suspicious malignant groups. Diagnostic accuracy parameters were calculated. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed for the two modalities. The agreement and correlation between maximum lesion diameter based on CESM and MRI, or CESM and pathology were analyzed. RESULTS: Diagnostic accuracy parameters for CESM were sensitivity 95.8 %, specificity 65.5 %, PPV 82.1 %, NPV 90.5 % and accuracy 84.4 %. The diagnostic accuracy parameters for breast MRI were sensitivity 93.8 %, specificity 82.8 %, PPV 88.2 %, NPV 92.3 %and accuracy 89.6 %. Area under the curve (AUC) of ROC was 0.96 for breast MRI and 0.88 for CESM. The Bland–Altman plots showed a mean difference of 0.7 mm with 95 % limits of agreement of 11.4 mm in tumor diameter measured using CESM and breast MRI. The differences of size measurement between CESM and breast MRI were significant, whereas no difference was observed between CESM and pathology as well as between breast MRI and pathology. The better correlation with pathological results was found in CESM than breast MRI. CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrates that CESM possesses better diagnostic performances than breast MRI in terms of diagnostic sensitivity and lesion size assessment. And CESM is a good alternative method of screening breast cancer in high-risk people.