Table 1.
Clinical and pathologic characteristics of LABC patients receiving neo-adjuvant chemotherapy.
Fig 1.
B-mode and QUS parametric images MBF, SI, and AAC from a complete responder (A), partial responder (B), and non-responder (C) before start of NAC (Pre-Tx) and after 4 weeks of treatment. High magnification light microscope images of whole mount histopathology from complete, partial and non-responders (D). The scale bars in ultrasound images represent 5 mm. The color bars present scale for MBF parameter of -16 to 18 dBr, for SI parameter of -15 to 50 dBr, and for AAC parameter of 12 to 66 dB/cm3. The scale bar in histology represents 200 microns. MBF, mid-band fit; SI, spectral intercept; AAC, average acoustic concentration, Pre-Tx, prior to treatment.
Fig 2.
Average changes in average acoustic concentration and corresponding texture parameters measured in ultimate clinical and pathological complete, partial and non-responders at times before and after the start of treatment.
AAC, average acoustic concentration; CON, contrast; COR, correlation; ENE, energy; HOM, homogeneity; CR, complete responder; PR, partial responder; NR, non-responder.
Table 2.
Features which exhibited significance differences between two response groups: CR vs PR, CR vs NR and PR vs NR.
Fig 3.
Feature histograms obtained from week 8 data set over 10 iterations of classifications.
In each iteration, best features were selected using sequential feature selection method and frequencies of occurrence of selected features over 10 iterations are presented. MBF, mid-band fit; SS, spectral slope; SI, spectral intercept; SAS, spacing among scatterers; ASD, average scatterer diameter; ACE, attenuation co-efficient estimate; AAC, average acoustic concentration; ER, estrogen receptor; HER2, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2; CON, contrast; COR, correlation; ENE, energy; HOM, homogeneity; 0, parameter estimated prior to treatment.
Table 3.
Selected features for three- type tumor response classification using sequential feature selection method.
Features are arranged from higher to lower frequency of occurrence over 10 iterations.
Fig 4.
Recurrence free survival curves for chemotherapy treatment response based on ultimate clinical-pathological assessment, and comparison to predicted recurrence free survival curves when based on quantitative ultrasound, texture parameters and molecular features acquired at weeks 1, 4, and 8 after treatment.
CR, complete responder; PR, partial responder; NR, non-responder; QUS + Texture + Molecule, combination of mean QUS values, texture and molecular features.