Ultrasound In Solid Breast Masses: Benign Versus Malign

With the rapid technological advances, ultrasonography (US) has become an important breast imaging procedure in the last decade. In addition to the complementary role to mammography and magnetic resonance imaging, today it has an important place in interventional situations such as guiding needle aspiration, core needle biopsy and presurgery needle localization. American College of Radiology has developed “The Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System” (BIRADS) lexicon to standardize the terminology in the US reports. This lexicon includes the descriptors from several feature categories, the assessment of findings and the recommendation of the action to be taken. Six morphologic features were described for solid breast masses: shape, orientation, margin, lesion boundary, internal echo pattern and posterior acoustic features. Despite the known overlap between benign and malignant features, typical signs of benignity were oval shape, gently lobulation, homogenous hyperechogenity, parallel orientation; typical signs of malignity were irregular shape, antiparallel orientation, noncircumscribed margin, echogenic halo, decreased sound transmission. The purpose of this article was to discuss reliability of these BIRADS US lexicon descriptors in the differentiation of benign from malignant solid masses of the breast.