Breast biopsy patterns and outcomes in Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results—Medicare data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite known benefits to needle biopsy for suspicious breast lesions, variability in the use of this technique has been documented in practice. We sought to study the use of needle biopsy and open surgical biopsy in women with breast cancer, predictors of needle biopsy use, and the effect of biopsy choice on overall number of surgical procedures needed to treat breast cancer. METHODS: We analyzed Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare data for 45,542 women diagnosed between 1991 and 1999 with ductal carcinoma in situ and stage I-II breast cancer. By using diagnosis and procedure codes from 3 months before to 6 months after the SEER diagnosis, we classified the initial biopsy as needle or surgical. By using multivariate logistic regression, we identified patient and tumor characteristics associated with needle biopsy use, and estimated the association between initial biopsy type and likelihood for multiple breast surgeries. RESULTS: Needle biopsy was the initial procedure for 11,073 (24.3%) women. In multivariate analyses, needle biopsy use varied significantly by race, year of diagnosis, and tumor size. After controlling for patient and tumor characteristics, needle biopsy use was associated with a reduced likelihood of multiple breast surgeries (odds ratio, 0.35; 95% confidence interval, 0.34-0.37). CONCLUSIONS: Use of needle biopsy as the initial breast cancer procedure was more common among black women and those with larger tumors, and increased significantly over time. Providers should consider needle biopsy when clinically feasible as the initial breast procedure, because it may reduce the number of surgeries needed to treat breast cancer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".