Investigation of four cases of mucinous breast carcinoma that underwent contrast-enhanced ultrasonography with Sonazoid

Abstract

It has been reported that contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) can detect minute blood flows in breast tumors. As such, CEUS is a useful modality for diagnosing breast tumors. Although there are some CEUS studies of breast cancer in the literature, there are few reports of mucinous carcinoma of the breast. Between October 2014 and December 2016, we retrospectively enrolled four mucinous breast cancer patients who underwent CEUS examinations in this study. We used a LOGIQ E9 (GE Healthcare) with a ML6-15-D linear transducer. We acquired CEUS images for about 1 minute after intravenous injection of Sonazoid (0.015 ml/kg). Pathological findings in three cases revealed mixed types of mucinous carcinoma, and one case had a pure type. The mixed-type mucinous carcinomas showed ring-like enhancement or heterogeneous enhancement. And the pure-type mucinous carcinoma exhibited no apparent enhancement. The results in this study implied that CEUS findings of mixed-type mucinous carcinomas were different from those of pure-type ones. We conjectured that the contrast-enhanced appearance of mucinous breast carcinomas was dependent on the volume of invasive components.