ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Breast Cancer
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1538775
Diagnostic value of ultrasonographic features in breast cancer and its correlation with hormone receptor expression
Provisionally accepted
- Central Hospital of Wuhan, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The objective of this research is to investigate the diagnostic value of Ultrasonographic characteristics in breast cancer (BC) and its relation to hormone receptor status. Patients who underwent BC surgery from January 2020 to December 2022 were included, 68 patients with malignant and 40 patients with benign, based on pathological diagnosis as the reference standard. Each patient volunteered for an elastography imaging examination, and one lesion was evaluated for each patient. Patients had with mean age of 53.57 years (±6.34), and lesion diameters ranged from 0.53-2.5 cm (1.29 cm ± 0.41).Kappa consistency analysis examined the inter-observer reliability of ultrasound elasticity signs in discriminating malignant from benign neoplasms. The correlation between ultrasonographic features and hormone receptor activity was also determined using Spearman correlation. Possible factors for having malignant BC lesions were tested, and binary logistic regression was utilized to develop the nomogram prediction model. There the malignant and benign groups were statistically significant in terms of ER, PR, Ki-67, HER-2 expression, marginal burrs, calcification foci, lesion diameter, and blood flow signal grading (P-levels < 0.05). The results of elastography indicated substantial concordance with pathological diagnosis (kappa = 0.875; P < 0.01).Ki-67, burr sign and ER, as well as blood flow signal grading with PR, ER, Ki-67 and HER-2 were also observed. The independent predictors of malignancy in multivariate analysis included calcifications burr sign blood flow grading elasticity score ER and HER-2 (P < 0.05). By analyzing comprehensive clinical characteristics and measuring the total score as 263 points, the nomogram model achieved high validity in predicting the malignancy of breast lesions and could be applied in daily work with a 74.12% predicted probability of malignancy. The performance of ultrasound elastography is promising for BC diagnosis, and the association with hormone receptor status is highly significant. Further confirming that the elasticity score has significant clinical value for the diagnosis of malignant breast lesions, in addition to the fact that hormone receptor levels are independent of elasticity score, we can conclude that the elasticity score and hormone receptor levels are two distinct factors for malignant lesions.
Keywords: ultrasound elastography, breast cancer, diagnostic value, hormone receptor expression, malignant breast lesions
Received: 03 Dec 2024; Accepted: 10 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Yang and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jianxin Liu, Central Hospital of Wuhan, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.