DOI: 10.36347/sasjs

Pages: 172-179

The Nottingham Prognostic Index (NPI), based on invasive tumor size, lymph node stage and histological tumor grade, is a reliable prognostic index used to predict patient survival in both large and small-sized breast cancers. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether pre-operative Color Doppler ultrasonography can be used as a prognostic tool for evaluating the degree of malignancy of breast cancer and hence it attempted to define the correlation of NPI and various other clinicopathological factors with Resistance Index (RI), a measure of pulsatility in neovascularization. RI within the breast tumor correlates significantly with the NPI in breast cancer (p-Value < 0.01). RI of peripheral normal breast tissue does not correlate with NPI and intratumoral RI. Patient’s age, size of tumor and hormonal status (ER/PR/HER-2/neu) has no statistically significant correlation with intratumoral RI whereas clinical stage, histological grade and lymph node score of breast cancer correlates significantly with intratumoral RI (p-Value < 0.01). Therefore, Color Doppler ultrasonography with RI as the measuring index can be considered to be a good prognostic marker pre-operatively in determining the degree of malignancy, prognosis as well as the need for neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast carcinoma and hence, in due course of time, can be expected to be a better noninvasive option than the existing conventional methods which are either costly or invasive or both