COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DIAGNOSTIC EFFICACY OF FNAC, HR-USG & MAMMOGRAPHY IN PALPABLE BREAST LUMP

Abstract

BACKGROUND With growing awareness and increasing literacy, people have now become more conscious about problems related to breast. The commonest mode of presentation of diseases of the breast is "lump" or a "palpable mass". It may not necessarily be a malignant lesion, instead palpable breast masses are common and are usually benign, but efficient evaluation and prompt diagnosis are necessary to rule out malignancy. The present study was planned with an aim to evaluate the efficacy of HR-USG, Mammography and FNAC, either individually or in combination for the diagnosis of palpable breast lumps. MATERIALS AND METHODS The descriptive study was carried out at Department of Surgery, Era's Lucknow Medical College, Lucknow. Duration of study was 18 months starting from January 2017 to June 2018. A total of 65 patients were enrolled in the study who underwent HR-USG, FNAC, Mammography and Histopathological examination. RESULTS In present study, majority of cases were histopathologically confirmed as benign (69.2%). Among benign cases, maximum (n=37; 56.9%) were diagnosed as fibroadenoma, 4 (6.2%) were diagnosed as simple benign lesion and 3 (4.6%) were diagnosed as chronic inflammatory lesion. There were 21 (30.8%) malignant cases, for malignancy, FNAC had a sensitivity and specificity of 90% and 100% as compared to 76.2% and 100% for mammography and 71.4% and 97.7% for USG. CONCLUSION The findings of the present study suggest that among three diagnostic modalities being evaluated, FNAC was the best, but one of the limitations of FNAC was inconclusive findings in few cases. However, complementary use of USG for these cases which were inconclusive on FNAC helped to achieve the best diagnostic combination for evaluation of palpable lump.