Automated versus handheld breast ultrasound examinations of suspicious breast masses: methodological errors in the reliability analysis

摘要

I was interested to read the recently published article by Yun et al. in the July 2019 issue of [ ]. The purpose of the authors was to assess the reliability of automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) examinations of suspicious breast masses in comparison to handheld breast ultrasound (HHUS) with regard to Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) category assessment, and to investigate the factors affecting discrepancies in categorization. A total of 135 masses that were assessed as BI-RADS categories 4 and 5 on ABUS and underwent ultrasound-guided core needle biopsy from May 2017 to December 2017 were included in this study. The BIRADS categories were re-assessed using HHUS. Agreement of the BI-RADS categories was evaluated using kappa statistics, and the positive predictive value of each examination was calculated. They reported that the overall agreement between ABUS and HHUS in all cases was good (79.3%, kappa=0.61, P<0.001).