As a promising imaging modality for assessment of breast lesions, cone-beam breast computed tomography (CBBCT) provides images with high spatial resolution and high contrast resolution and real-time three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the breast, costs less time and money than MRI, improves patient comfort without compression compared with MG and enables to detect calcification in comparison with US. CBBCT improves the sensitivity and specificity of breast cancer detection and characterization, contributes to precise positioning and range measurement. Contrast-enhanced CBBCT has the potential to visualise tumor angiogenesis...

This study was conducted at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center in China from May 2012 to August 2014. All the enrolled patients withsurgically proven nodal statuswere retrospectivelyevaluated, whowereunderwent preoperativecontrast-enhanced CBBCT. Of the 57breast cancer cases,18were associated with positive LNs and 39cases were associated with negative LNs (Fig.1). During follow-up, 4 patients (7.02%) developeddisease recurrence or distant metastasis during the median follow-up of 47.4 months (rangefrom 25.8 to 69.0 months). The remaining 53 patients (92.98%) had no disease recurrence or distant metastasisafter the median follow-up period...

On univariate analyses, tumor size (the longest diameter of tumor, the tumor-to-fibroglandular tissue volume ratio (TFR)) and lymphatic vascular invasion (LVI) were strongly related to lymph node involvement. After multivariate logistic regression analysis, shrinking TFR (hazard ratio=1.060, P=0.030) and the presence ofLVI (hazard ratio=7.351,P=0.007)were found to be positively associated with axillary lymph node metastasis, yieldingan area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of0.835 (95% CI, 0.726-0.944) (Fig.3).We included the predictors of nodal involvement to analyze the validation set 0f 122 cases using multivariate analysis....

Contrast-enhanced CBBCT shows promise for predicting axillary lymph node involvement and prognosis, especially the definition of TFR, which reflecting the tumor size and internal structure of breast. After adding clinical-pathological factors, the performance of the above models were improved.

W. Ma; Guangzhou/CN - nothing to disclose

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