Keywords:
Breast, MR, Acceptance testing, Comparative studies, Diagnostic procedure, Economics, Patterns of Care
Authors:
S. A. H. hassanein, R. Habib; Shibin El Kom/EG
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-0560
Aims and objectives
Breast cancer is second to lung cancer as the leading cause of death among women in the United States.
Over 40,000 women were estimated to die of breast cancer in 2016.
[1] Since the 5-year survival rates for breast cancer depend on the stage at the time of diagnosis (figure 1) Fig. 1 ,
hence early detection is the key to improved survival.
[2]
Breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers the highest known sensitivity for diagnosing and detecting abnormalities in the breast.
[3], however it has traditionally been used as a second-line imaging method to solve diagnostic problems in patients with equivocal findings on mammography or ultrasound and to improve the detection and characterization of primary and recurrent breast cancers and for evaluation of the response to therapy. [4 ,
5]
The use of breast MRI for screening has increased over the past decade.
However,
it was limited to screening high risk patients.
[6 – 9].
Also,
its application in more general screening is hindered by high cost.
The high cost for breast MRI is due,
in large part,
to high fixed costs for equipment acquisition,
operation,
maintenance,
and relatively low throughput due to exam duration.
[10]
Another reason for the high cost is the fact that current breast MRI protocols are time consuming both to acquire and read [11].
For example,
the MRI examination of both breasts at our institution occupies the magnet for about 35 minutes and generates several hundred images.
this protocol was used for both diagnostic and screening purposes making it too lengthy and costly as a screening tool,
hence emerged the need for an abbreviated protocol that is meant to be both cost and time efficient without sacrificing the accuracy of the scan for detecting breast cancer
Therefore,
the purpose of our study was to evaluate the proposed abbreviated breast MRI protocol (formed of the first post-contrast subtracted images [FAST] and its maximum-intensity projection [MIP]) in comparison to the traditional breast MRI protocol.