Dr. Kathryn Greenberg and colleagues investigated the performance of handheld screening breast ultrasound in women with dense breast tissue, in part to track the effects of a 2009 Connecticut law that requires radiologists to inform patients with mammographically dense breasts that they may benefit from the addition of screening breast ultrasound. They found that breast ultrasound's overall cancer detection rate was 0.32%, comparable to that of mammography.
Greenberg's team performed a retrospective review of 937 women with dense breasts on mammography who subsequently underwent handheld screening breast ultrasound between October 2009 and September 2010.
Sixty biopsies were performed in 52 patients out of the total cohort of 937 women. Fifty-seven of these biopsies proved benign and three proved malignant (all three malignancies were BI-RADS 4 lesions), Greenberg's team found.
Although the overall cancer detection rate was comparable between breast ultrasound and mammography, the overall positive predictive value for biopsy of these BI-RADS 4 lesions was 5.9%, quite a bit lower than mammography's 20%.
