Believing that an accurate breast ultrasound CAD system may open the door for breast ultrasound to be used as a screening tool, the researchers sought to assess the technology's diagnostic accuracy, according to presenter Paula O'Donoghue of the Joint Department of Medical Imaging in Toronto.
The study team evaluated B-CAD software (Medipattern, Toronto) on 266 breast lesions in two modes: automated and interactive (used with a human observer).
While the software may accurately characterize the majority of malignant lesions to be suspicious for malignancy, it was the interactive CAD model that offered the best performance.
"The study finds that interactive breast ultrasound CAD has a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 93% with an accuracy of 97%," O'Donoghue told AuntMinnie.com. "Some improvement in lesion segmentation (i.e., lesion outline), is required in order to increase the diagnostic accuracy of [the] automated B-CAD system, with the possible future potential of a US-CAD application that can be applied to the 'real-time' sonographic examination."
O'Donoghue also noted that the potential yield of using B-CAD by readers with different levels of expertise needs to be assessed prospectively.
