Clinical assessment, mammography and ultrasonography as methods of measuring the size of breast cancer: a comparison

The size of a breast cancer is used for selection of surgical treatment modalities and assessment of nonoperative treatment of the tumour. To investigate prospectively which method could predict tumour size reliably, the tumour size was measured in 138 consecutive female patients with palpable breast cancer, using palpation, mammography and ultrasonography. These measurements were correlated with the histological size. The correlation coefficients between clinical assessment, mammography, ultrasonography and histological size were 0.71, 0.65 and 0.80 after logistic transformation of the data, respectively. Clinical assessment overestimates the tumour size, whereas mammography and ultrasonography slightly underestimate the size. This study demonstrates that ultrasonography appears to be a feasible and the most reliable method for pre-operative assessment of the size of palpable breast carcinomas.