Incident Angle of the Plunging Artery of Breast Tumors

We measured the incident angle of the feeding artery of breast tumors on color Doppler ultrasonography. Ninety-two tumors that had plunging arteries (21 fibroadenomas and 71 breast cancers) were retrospectively evaluated. Breast cancers were divided into three types [accentuating type (ACC), 25; intermediate type (INT), 35; and attenuating type (ATT), 11] by posterior echo. Color Doppler ultrasonography was performed using an HDI 5000 (ATL Ultrasound, USA) with a 7- to 10-MHz linear probe.We measured the incident angle of the feeding artery on color Doppler imaging. If the tumor had many plunging vessels, we measured all of them. The average incident angle of the artery of fibroadenoma was 47.5° and that of breast cancer was 17.6°. Fibroadenoma ranged from 15° to 70° and breast cancer from 0° to 70°. In breast cancer, there were no significant differences among the three types (ACC, INT, and ATT). We concluded that the incident angle of the feeding artery adds valuable information to the color Doppler ultrasonographic diagnosis for breast tumors.