Magnetic resonance imaging of the breast– where are we in 2021?

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a sensitive and safe radiological method for breast and axillar lymph node imaging. MRI is widely used for diagnostics and follow-up of breast cancer candidates for neoadjuvant chemotherapy. MRI is used to assess tumor response to chemotherapy in these patients and help plan the type of surgical procedure needed after the therapy. Also, preoperative MRI changes the surgical approach in 11-16% of the cases and depicts the occult tumor in the contralateral breast in 3-4% of patients whose primary treatment is surgery. Several studies in recent years, some on more than a thousand patients, have shown usefulness of breast MRI for planning surgical approaches reducing the number of patients with positive resection margins, thus reducing the number of patients who need reoperation. In future, we should aim to include MRI of the breast as a diagnostic tool in more, if not all, patients diagnosed with breast cancer.

Keywords

• breast MRI
• neoadjuvant chemotherapy
• early breast cancer