Adaptive speckle reduction for improving the differential diagnosis of breast lesions

Adaptive speckle reduction could mask diagnostic features and adversely affect diagnosis of focal breast lesions. Four radiologists assessed focal breast lesions (29 malignant and 31 benign) by blind review of representative static B-mode scans before and after adaptive speckle reduction processing, scoring 14 diagnostic features for breast cancer and recording their opinions on the diagnosis and on how adaptive speckle reduction affected interpretation of each feature. No adverse affect on diagnosis of malignant (P = 0.756) or benign (P = 1.000) breast lesions was found, despite some differences in scoring of the diagnostic features after adaptive speckle reduction. Observer recognition of most diagnostic features was easier after adaptive speckle reduction (e.g., edge definition [50% of cases], edge regularity [40%], lesion texture [44%], and lesion echogenicity [35%]).