Advanced MR applications for solid breast lesions; diffusion-weighted imaging

PURPOSE: Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) has high sensitivity, but lacks specificity for characterization of malignant and benign breast lesions. Diffusion-weighted imaging(DWI) has shown potential to improve specificity for lesion characterization on dynamic contrast enhanced MRI. In this study we aimed to determine diagnostic contribution of DWI which were identified convantional enhanced MRI to the cases who applied with malign and benign solid breast lesions. MATERİALS AND METHODS :In our study 82 female patients(91 solid lesions) underwent breast MRI, included the DWI and dynamic contrast- enhanced images. Histopatologically 44 lesions were benign and 47 lesions were malignant.Morphologic and kinetic analyses were performed on DCE-MRI and findings were classified according to the BI-RADS lexicon and consider BI-RADS category 2-3 lesions as benign, category 4-5 lesions as malign and compared with histopatologies of lesions. Then we compared the ADC?s of the benign and malignant breast lesions to the ADC?s of the normal fibroglandular tissue. The mean ADC?s of malignant tumors(0.80x10-3mm2/sn±0.39), are significantly lower than those of benign lesions(1.35x10-3mm2/sn±0.31)and the normal fibroglandular tissue(1.27x10-3mm2/sn ±0.30). In DWI we measured ADC values. When the cut off value was accepted as 1.00 x10-3mm2/sn, the sensitivity was found as %89.3 and the specifity was found as %88.6 in discrimination of malignant and benign lesions. CONCLUSİONS :Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI could produce high diagnostic accuracy in differentiating benign and malignant breast tumors. According to ADC value malign and benign lesions results, the findins in our study were competible with the literature.İn addition to MRI the ADC values may potentially help differentiating benign and malignant breast lesions.