Performance of Pathognomonic Magnetic Resonance Imaging Findings for Diagnosis of Triple Negative Breast Cancers

Abstract

Background: Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) has the worst prognosis of any subtype of the disease because of tumor heterogeneity and a chronic lack of other effective treatment lines. To improve the low survival rate, early identification is the key. Objective: Our study aimed to determine the accuracy of Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) in differentiating TNBC from other Non-Triple Negative Breast Cancer (NTNBC) subtypes using pathological examination as the gold standard. Subjects and procedures Retrospective study was conducted at the Radio-diagnosis, Oncology, and Surgery departments of Meet Ghamr Oncology center, enrolling 68 female patients with pathologically proven 83 malignant breast lesions of different immunochemistry subtypes, consisting of TNBC (22 patients/29 lesions) and NTNBC (46 patients /54 lesions). Every patient received both conventional and (DCE) MRI scans, which are compared to histopathological and immune-chemistry analyses. Results: TNBC and NTNBC subtypes groups differed significantly (p<0.05) in terms of the tumor's size, shape, Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) value, enhancement shape and distribution, and specific criteria like central necrosis and peritumoral high T2 Weighted Image (T2WI) signal. There was a highly significant difference (p<0.001) between the two groups in terms of (Patient age, histologic grade, tumor margin, lesion-high T2W signal, and enhancement pattern). Validity values for differentiating between TNBC and NTNBC using combined DCE-MRI and MRI-Specific criteria were (100%, 91.49%, 87.1%, and 100%) as opposed to (88.89%, 97.87%, 96%, and 93.9%) Conclusions: The results of our study demonstrated the possibility of MRI-based imaging criteria for more accurate prediction and differentiation of TNBC from other subtypes.