Simple Summary
Assessing whether breast cancer has spread to the axillary lymph nodes is important for determining the disease stage and guiding treatment. Standard ultrasound is commonly used to evaluate lymph nodes, but it cannot always reliably distinguish cancerous lymph nodes from those enlarged due to benign reactive changes. In this study, we evaluated shear wave elastography, an ultrasound-based technique that measures tissue stiffness, in 141 women with breast cancer undergoing lymph node biopsy. Adding lymph node stiffness measurements to standard ultrasound improved the ability to distinguish cancerous from non-cancerous lymph nodes. Lymph node stiffness also differed among some breast cancer subtypes, particularly Luminal A and Luminal B tumors, but it was not associated with tumor grade. These findings suggest that shear wave elastography may provide useful additional noninvasive information for evaluating axillary lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer.
Abstract
Background: Accurate preoperative characterization of axillary lymph nodes (ALNs) is important in breast cancer, but conventional ultrasound has variable diagnostic performance. We evaluated quantitative shear wave elastography (SWE) for distinguishing reactive from metastatic ALNs, and we explored associations between nodal SWE parameters, breast cancer subtypes, and histological grades. Methods: We prospectively enrolled women with suspicious breast lesions and ALNs identified by clinical ultrasound who were scheduled for biopsy. After exclusions, 141 patients (57 reactive and 84 metastatic ALNs) were included. ElasticNet-regularized logistic regression with nested cross-validation compared clinical ultrasound alone with ultrasound plus SWE. Among 70 patients with metastatic ALNs and immunohistochemical characterization, SWE parameters were compared across surrogate subtypes and histological grades using Kruskal–Wallis tests with Holm adjustments. Results: The combined ultrasound–SWE model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.911 (95% CI, 0.859–0.961) compared to 0.798 (95% CI, 0.723–0.873) for ultrasound alone. At the Youden-derived threshold, the combined model achieved 88.1% sensitivity, 82.5% specificity, and 85.8% accuracy. Among metastatic ALNs, SWE parameters, namely Vmean, Vsd, and Vmax, differed significantly across surrogate subtypes, with the most pronounced differences observed between Luminal A and Luminal B tumors, (p = 0.0250, p = 0.0069, and p = 0.0065). No statistically significant differences were detected with histological grades in the five SWE parameters. Conclusions: Quantitative SWE complemented conventional ultrasound for assessing axillary nodal metastasis, with higher cross-validated discrimination for the combined model. Exploratory analyses identified differences in several SWE stiffness metrics between Luminal A and Luminal B tumors; these subtype-associated biomechanical differences require validation in larger cohorts.