European Radiology: Application of ultrasound elastography in predicting axillary lymph node status after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer

Currently, surgery after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is the standard treatment for patients with locally advanced breast cancer and node-positive disease

Therefore, with the increase in the utility of NAC and the improvement in the efficacy of chemotherapy, the use of ALND surgery has been widely questioned in clinical practice for patients with breast cancer who have converted to node-negative breast cancer after NAC

Despite mounting evidence supporting the feasibility of performing SLNB in ​​patients with initially node-positive breast cancer, false negative rates (FNRs) are often unacceptably high

Compared with conventional US, ultrasound elastography (UE) can provide additional information on tissue stiffness, which is closely related to tumorigenesis and disease progression

Recently, a study published in European Radiology explored the value of combining axillary US and breast SWE in the detection of residual axillary LN metastases after NAC in patients with initially biopsy-proven node-positive breast cancer for an early clinical, accurate, and noninvasive assessment.

This study evaluated 201 patients with node-positive breast cancer who received NAC between September 2016 and December 2021

The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the ability of traditional US features to judge axillary status after NAC was 0.

The results of this study suggest that breast SWE can be used as a complementary imaging modality for assessing axillary lymph node status after NAC

Original source:

Jia-Xin Huang, Shi-Yang Lin, Yan Ou, et al.