RSI predicts early response to chemotherapy in breast cancer

Restriction spectrum imaging (RSI) is a suitable method for evaluating neoadjuvant therapy response early for breast cancer, suggest findings presented December 6 at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. In her presentation, Maren Andreassen, MD, PhD, from the University of California, San Diego discussed her team’s work, which found that a novel RSI cancer tissue classifier predicted response to neoadjuvant therapy after three weeks. The team also found that RSI could identify most cases with residual tumor at surgery. “RSI performance was similar to performance by standard MRI by manual tumor measurement on dynamic contrast enhancement [DCE-MRI],” Andreassen said. DCE-MRI is used to assess neoadjuvant therapy response for breast cancer treatment. However, Andreassen pointed out that this method needs expert radiologist readers to evaluate the change in longest tumor dimension during therapy, as well as administering gadolinium-based contrast agents. Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) does not require contrast agents and detects the microscopic diffusion of water molecules. However, the commonly used DWI method, apparent diffusion coefficient, currently does not have full utility in breast imaging, Andreassen said. She and colleagues evaluated the performance of RSI, a more recent DWI method, in automatically monitoring breast tumor size during neoadjuvant therapy. RSI allows for differentiating of restricted diffusion from cancer cells to that of normal tissue cells...
Source: AuntMinnie.com Headlines - Category: Radiology Authors: Tags: Subspecialties MRI Breast Breast Imaging Source Type: news