Male breast disease: pictorial review with radiologic-pathologic correlation.

The male breast is susceptible to many of the same pathologic processes as the female breast. Many of these conditions have mammographic, ultrasonographic (US), and magnetic resonance imaging findings that allow differentiation between clearly benign conditions and those that require biopsy. Gynecomastia is the most common abnormality of the male breast and has characteristic imaging features that usually allow differentiation from malignancy. Mammography is the initial imaging modality for a clinically suspicious mass. A palpable mass that is occult or incompletely imaged at mammography mandates targeted US. Suspicious or indeterminate masses require biopsy, which can usually be performed with US guidance. Approximately 0.7% of breast cancers occur in men. Men with breast cancer often present at a more advanced stage than do women owing to a delay in diagnosis. Benign breast neoplasms that may occur in men include angiolipoma, schwannoma, intraductal papilloma, and lipoma. Benign nonneoplastic entities that may occur in the male breast include intramammary lymph node, sebaceous cyst, diabetic mastopathy, hematoma, fat necrosis, subareolar abscess, breast augmentation, venous malformation, secondary syphilis, and nodular fasciitis. Familiarity with the salient features of the classic benign male breast conditions will allow accurate imaging interpretation and avoid unnecessary and often invasive treatment. © RSNA, 2013.

A feasible high spatiotemporal resolution breast DCE-MRI protocol for clinical settings.

Three dimensional bilateral imaging is the standard for most clinical breast dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI protocols. Because of high spatial resolution (sRes) requirement, the typical 1-2 min temporal resolution (tRes) afforded by a conventional full-k-space-sampling gradient echo (GRE) sequence precludes meaningful and accurate pharmacokinetic analysis of DCE time-course data. The commercially available, GRE-based, k-space undersampling and data sharing TWIST (time-resolved angiography with stochastic trajectories) sequence was used in this study to perform DCE-MRI exams on thirty one patients (with 36 suspicious breast lesions) before their biopsies. The TWIST DCE-MRI was immediately followed by a single-frame conventional GRE acquisition. Blinded from each other, three radiologist readers assessed agreements in multiple lesion morphology categories between the last set of TWIST DCE images and the conventional GRE images. Fleiss' κ test was used to evaluate inter-reader agreement. The TWIST DCE time-course data were subjected to quantitative pharmacokinetic analyses. With a four-channel phased-array breast coil, the TWIST sequence produced DCE images with 20 s or less tRes and ~ 1.0×1.0×1.4 mm(3) sRes. There were no significant differences in signal-to-noise (P=.45) and contrast-to-noise (P=.51) ratios between the TWIST and conventional GRE images. The agreements in morphology evaluations between the two image sets were excellent with the intra-reader agreement ranging from 79% for mass margin to 100% for mammographic density and the inter-reader κ value ranging from 0.54 (P<.0001) for lesion size to 1.00 (P<.0001) for background parenchymal enhancement. Quantitative analyses of the DCE time-course data provided higher breast cancer diagnostic accuracy (91% specificity at 100% sensitivity) than the current clinical practice of morphology and qualitative kinetics assessments. The TWIST sequence may be used in clinical settings to acquire high spatiotemporal resolution breast DCE-MRI images for both precise lesion morphology characterization and accurate pharmacokinetic analysis.