Logistic discriminant analysis of breast cancer using ultrasound measurements

Background: Logistic discriminant method was applied to differentiate malignant from benign in a group of patients with proved breast lesions on the basis of ultrasonic parameters. Materials and Methods: Our database include 273 patients' ultrasonographic pictures consisting of 14 quantitative variables. The measured variables were ultrasound propagation velocity, acoustic impedence and attenuation coefficient at 10 MHz in breast lesions at 20, 25, 30 and 35 º C temperature, physicsl density and age. This database was randomly divided into the estimation of 201 and validation of 72 samples. The estimation samples were used to build the logistic discriminant model, and validation samples were used to validate the performance. Finally, important criteria such as sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) were evaluated. Results: Our results showed that the logistic discriminant method was able to classify correctly 67 out of 72 cases presented in the validation sample. The results indicate a remarkable diagnostic accuracy of 93%. Conclusion: A logistic discriminantor approach is capable of predicting the probability of malignancy of breast cancer. Features extracted from ultrasonic measurement on ultrasound imaging is used in this approach. Iran . J. Radiat. Res., 2004 2 (1): 27-34