Contrast-enhanced spectral mammography: Impact of the qualitative morphology descriptors on the diagnosis of breast lesions

• We studied interpretation criteria for enhancing lesions on CESM.
• We evaluated the enhancement patterns of 211 breast lesions.
• Our results proved that CESM minimized positive and negative falsies in DM.
• The proposed CESM lexicon helped in characterization and categorization.

ObjectiveTo analyze the morphology and enhancement characteristics of breast lesions on contrast-enhanced spectral mammography (CESM) and to assess their impact on the differentiation between benign and malignant lesions.Materials and methodThis ethics committee approved study included 168 consecutive patients with 211 breast lesions over 18 months. Lesions classified as non-enhancing and enhancing and then the latter group was subdivided into mass and non-mass. Mass lesions descriptors included: shape, margins, pattern and degree of internal enhancement. Non-mass lesions descriptors included: distribution, pattern and degree of internal enhancement. The impact of each descriptor on diagnosis individually assessed using Chi test and the validity compared in both benign and malignant lesions. The overall performance of CESM were also calculated.ResultsThe study included 102 benign (48.3%) and 109 malignant (51.7%) lesions. Enhancement was encountered in 145/211 (68.7%) lesions. They further classified into enhancing mass (99/145, 68.3%) and non-mass lesions (46/145, 31.7%). Contrast uptake was significantly more frequent in malignant breast lesions (p value ≤0.001). Irregular mass lesions with intense and heterogeneous enhancement patterns correlated with a malignant pathology (p value ≤0.001). CESM showed an overall sensitivity of 88.99% and specificity of 83.33%. The positive and negative likelihood ratios were 5.34 and 0.13 respectively.ConclusionThe assessment of the morphology and enhancement characteristics of breast lesions on CESM enhances the performance of digital mammography in the differentiation between benign and malignant breast lesions.