Artificial intelligence-enhanced handheld breast ultrasound for screening: A systematic review of diagnostic test...

Breast cancer screening programs using mammography have led to significant mortality reduction in high-income countries. However, many low- and middle-income countries lack resources for mammographic screening. Handheld breast ultrasound (BUS) is a low-cost alternative but requires substantial training. Artificial intelligence (AI) enabled BUS may aid in both the detection and classification of breast cancer, enabling screening use in low-resource contexts. The purpose of this systematic review is to investigate whether AI-enhanced BUS is sufficiently accurate to serve as the primary modality in screening, particularly in resource-limited environments. This review (CRD42023493053) is reported in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. Evidence synthesis is reported in accordance with the SWiM (Synthesis Without Meta-analysis) guidelines. PubMed and Google Scholar were searched from January 1, 2016 to December 12, 2023. Studies are grouped according to AI task and assessed for quality. Of 763 candidate studies, 314 full texts were reviewed and 34 studies are included. The AI tasks of included studies are as follows: 1 frame selection, 6 lesion detection, 11 segmentation, and 16 classification. 79% of studies were at high or unclear risk of bias. Exemplary classification and segmentation AI systems perform with 0.976 AUROC and 0.838 Dice similarity coefficient. There has been encouraging development of AI for BUS. However, despite studies demonstrating high performance, substantial further research is required to validate reported performance in real-world screening programs. High-quality model validation on geographically external, screening datasets will be key to realizing the potential for AI-enhanced BUS in increasing screening access in resource-limited environments.