Mucinous breast cancer (MBC), particularly pure MBC (pMBC), often tend to be confused with fibroadenoma (FA) due to their similar images and firm masses, so some MBC cases are misdiagnosed to be FA, which may cause poor prognosis. We analyzed the ultrasonic features and aimed to identify the ability of multilayer perceptron (MLP) to classify early MBC and its subtypes and FA.
The study consisted of 193 patients diagnosed with pMBC, mMBC, or FA. The area under curve (AUC) was calculated to assess the effectiveness of age and 10 ultrasound features in differentiating MBC from FA. We used the pairwise comparison to examine the differences among MBC subtypes (pure and mixed types) and FA. We utilized the MLP to differentiate MBC and its subtypes from FA.
The nine features with AUCs over 0.5 were as follows: age, echo pattern, shape, orientation, margin, echo rim, vascularity distribution, vascularity grade, and tumor size. In subtype analysis, the significant differences were obtained in 10 variables (p-value range, 0.000–0.037) among pMBC, mMBC, and FA, except posterior feature. Through MLP, the AUCs of predicting MBC and FA were both 0.919; the AUCs of predicting pMBC, mMBC, and FA were 0.875, 0.767, and 0.927, respectively.
Our study found that the MLP models based on ultrasonic characteristics and age can well distinguish MBC and its subtypes from FA. It may provide a critical insight into MBC preoperative clinical management.