Spatiotemporal analysis of contrast-enhanced ultrasound for differentiating between malignant and benign breast lesions

ConclusionsThe proposed spatiotemporal analysis for assessing the enhancement heterogeneity shows promising results to aid in the diagnosis of breast cancer by CEUS.Clinical relevance statementThe proposed spatiotemporal method can be developed as a standardized software to automatically quantify the enhancement heterogeneity of breast cancer on CEUS, possibly leading to the improved diagnostic accuracy of differentiation between benign and malignant lesions.Key Points•Advanced spatiotemporal analysis of ultrasound contrast-enhanced loops for aiding the differentiation of malignant or benign breast lesions.•Four parameters reflecting the enhancement heterogeneity were estimated in the hyper- and partly-enhanced breast lesions by analyzing the neighboring pixel-level time-intensity curves.•For the classification of hyper-enhanced breast lesions, mutual information produces the best diagnostic performance (AUC = 0.893).
Source: European Radiology - Category: Radiology Source Type: research