Assessment of the accordance between sonography and mammography reports with pathology report based on sonographic guided core needle biopsy in diagnosis of breast masses

Background: Screening programs for the early diagnosis of breast cancer lead to perform several biopsies in order to determine the breast abnormalities found in sonography and mammography. According to gradually replacement of core needle biopsy instead of more invasive methods like open surgical biopsy, it seems necessary to study the concordance between biopsy results and non-invasive diagnostic methods in order to clarify ambiguous results and confirm the reliability of non-invasive methods. Objective: The objective of this study was to match the sonography and mammography reports with core needle biopsy in patients referred to Sahand core needle biopsy center. Materials and methods: This prospective cross-sectional study was performed on 240 patients referred to Sahand Center with sonography or mammography reports or by a surgeon for core needle biopsy. All the patients were examined by a gynecologist assistant and were asked about demographic information and their recent diseases. The matched sonography or mammography cases with pathology reports and positive predictive value based on comparison between them and pathology report were determined as standard diagnostic criteria. Then, data were statistically analyzed by SPSS v.21 software. Results: In this study, there was no statistically significant difference between sonography or mammography and pathology reports for categorizing patients in two distinct malignant and benign groups (p>0.05). There was also no difference observed in two age groups (p>0.05). In both sonography and mammography groups, the sensitivity and specificity were 60.32% and 92.96%, respectively. Moreover, the positive and negative predictive values of sonography and mammography were the same in both methods and were 70.37% and 86.56%, respectively. Conclusion: According to the significant concordance between sonographyand mammography with core needle biopsy, these non-invasive methods can be helpful in diagnosing malignant lesions and differentiating them from benign lesions; they are also affordable and available. The attention to underlying variables such as age, can improve sensitivity and specificity of non-invasive methods in comparison to invasive diagnostic methods.g.