Current Status of Breast MRI –Clinical applications

Abstract

Key Words: Breast, MRI,Screening Copyright: Deepika GunawardenaCorrespondence: Deepika Gunawardena, dsguna@yahoo.com Breast MRI is a powerful imaging tool with an excellent sensitivity around 94-100%, especially when double read, to detect cancers which are otherwise occult. However, lower specificity and high false positivity rates, demands histological confirmation of MRI only detected lesions to prevent possible over treatment. In order to maintain high standards and cost effectiveness of breast MRI, careful patient selection is as important as maintaining a meticulous technique or radiologist expertise. Breast MRI is useful at every phase of breast cancer management such as early detection, pre-operative staging, monitoring neo-adjuvant chemotherapy and identifying recurrences. This is a review on current best practice, for clinical applications of breast MRI.

Photoacoustic Imaging for Management of Breast Cancer: A Literature Review and Future Perspectives

“…Imaging of the dense breast tissues and breast implants can be successfully accomplished using MRI while they cannot be performed using X-ray mammogram [14,16,17]. MRI plays an important role as a diagnostic tool especially in detecting multifocal and contralateral or multicentric breast cancers, in detecting occult primary breast cancer, which is common in patients with axillary lymph node metastasis, and also in monitoring neoadjuvant chemotherapy and identifying the recurrences [14,16,18,19]. It provides good spatial resolution and it may also be useful in indicating whether or not the breast cancer has spread into the chest wall.…”

“…It takes a longer time compared to mammography. Apart from high cost and longer imaging time, MRI also has some other limitations such as low specificity and high false positive rates [15,17,18,22]. In the preoperative setting, this low specificity of MRI leads to diagnostic ambiguity, which may lead the surgeons to perform more extensive breast cancer operations.…”

“…Although MRI is generally considered to be more accurate than X-ray mammograms, occasionally it may fail to detect breast cancer, particularly involving calcium depositions for a particular patient, which can be detected by X-ray mammography [23,24]. Due to factors such as occasional low specificity, high cost, the requirement of contrast agents, unacceptability for pregnant women, and patients with metal implants, MRI is not a suitable imaging modality for early detection of breast cancer [10,14,18,25,26].…”

“…Sci. 2020, 10, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 30 unacceptability for pregnant women, and patients with metal implants, MRI is not a suitable imaging modality for early detection of breast cancer [10,14,18,25,26]. Angiogenesis, i.e., the production of new blood vessels, is a primary hallmark for detection of malignant lesions [27][28][29].This hallmark can be detected by probing the breast with optical radiation at the NIR (near-infrared) region.…”