Purpose
The Palpation imaging (PI) that closely mimics manual palpation but with enhanced sensitivity and specificity might be considered as a branch of elasticity imaging or elastography.
The PI probe with a force sensor array mounted on its tip acts similarly to human fingers during clinical examination.
PI translates the tissue’s elastic properties into a digital map and provides quantitative characterization of the detected mass using the data obtained by the sensor array pressed against the examined site.
The changes in the surface stress patterns as...
Methods and Materials
From June 2010 to December 2011,
169 patients with 195 breast lesions,
of which 125 were breast cancers and 70 were benign lesions verified by surgical pathology,
were examined by PI,
physical examination,
mammography and ultrasound in cancer hospital,
Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
The hardness,
shape,
homogeneity,
and mobility of the lesion extracted from PI were used for lesion characterization.
To compare diagnostic performance of a test for the features characterizing the lesion,
we use the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis and evaluate...
Results
The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve(AUC) characterizing benign and malignant lesion discrimination was 0.884 (95%CI: 0.836~0.932,
P<0.001) for PI(see Fig.1).
The sensitivity of PI was 82.4%,
which was significantly higher than that of physical examination (48%,
P=0.000) but lower than that of either mammography (93.6%,
P=0.003) or ultrasound (95.5%,
P=0.000).
The specificity of PI (80.0%) was significantly better than that of mammography (55.7%,
P=0.002) and ultrasound (62.3%,
P=0.023),
and similar to that of physical examination (91.4%,
P=0.096) (see Table 1 and Table 2)....
Conclusion
PI has the capability for differentiation of benign and malignant breast lesions,
and may serve as an adjunct to physical examination,
mammography and ultrasound in the diagnosis of breast diseases.
References
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Egorov,
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Sarvazyan.Mechanical Imaging of the Breast.
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Mechanical imaging in medical applications.
ConfProc IEEE Eng Med BiolSoc 2009:1975–1978