Improvement in specificity of ultrasonography for diagnosis of breast tumors by means of artificial intelligence.
A set of ultrasonograms of lesions from 200 patients between the ages of 14 and 93 years who underwent mammography followed by ultrasonographic examination and excisional biopsy has been studied with computer vision techniques to improve the ultrasonographic specificity of the diagnosis. Selected features representing the texture of the lesion were calculated and then classified by an artificial neural network. This network was biased toward correctly classifying all the malignant cases at the expense of some misclassification of the benign cases. The network diagnosed the malignant cases with 100% sensitivity and 40% specificity (compared with 0% specificity for the radiologists diagnosing the same set of cases in the breast imaging setting), and tests performed with a leave-one-out technique indicate that the network will generalize well to new cases. This suggests that methods based on neural network classification of texture features show promise for potentially decreasing the number of unnecessary biopsies by a significant amount in patients with sonographically identifiable lesions.