Objective: To investigate the value of color Doppler ultrasonography (CDU) and full-field digital mammography (FFDM) in diagnosis and differential diagnosis of benign and malignant breast lesions.
Methods: Retrospective analysis was performed on the clinical data of 107 patients with benign breast lesions and 100 patients with breast cancer， which were confirmed by surgical and pathological findings. The results of CDU and FFDM examination of the patients before operation were compared with the final diagnoses to assess the accuracy of the two methods and the diagnostic efficacy of their combination.
Results: All the patients underwent both CDU and FFDM examinations. The sensitivity and specificity was 88% and 82.84% for CDU， 89% and 75.7% for FFDM， and 97% and 88.78% for combination of CDU and FFDM， respectively. Based on a receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis， the overall accuracy for breast cancer detection was the combination of CDU and FFDM>CDU>FFDM， successively. The detection rate of CDU and FFDM for breast mass was 95% and 70%， respectively and the difference had statistical significance (P＜0.01). The detection rate of breast cancer in pre- and post-menopausal patients by CDU was 93.5% and 83.3% (P＞0.05)， and by FFDM was 80.4% and 96.3% (P＜0.05)， respectively. No significant difference was noted in the detection rate of breast cancer in the pre-menopausal patients between CDU and FFDM (P＞0.05)， while FFDM had higher detection rate of breast cancer than that of CDU in the post-menopausal patients (P＜0.05).
Conclusions: CDU has a high sensitivity to breast mass and FFDM has high detection rate of breast cancer in post-menopause patients. The combination of the two examinations can enhance the overall diagnostic accuracy for malignant breast lesions and decrease the missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis rate.