Preliminary Results of a Simplified Breast MRI Protocol to Characterize Breast Lesions

Abbreviated magnetic resonance imaging in breast cancer: A systematic review of literature

“…Varying versions of the abbreviated protocols have been reported in the literature. The selection of the sequences that make them up is apparently heuristic, with a general tendency using a non-contrast T1weighted (T1W) or T2-weighted (T2W) acquisition plus at least one contrast-enhanced sequence [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]27,34,44]. This is to improve the specificity, including information that allows greater discrimination between benign and malignant lesions and make it possible to evaluate the tumor uptake.…”

“…From the set of 31 retrospective studies, 11 included women who had undergone breast MRI by currently accepted indications, such as preoperative breast staging, problem-solving, follow-up for previous nonsurgical breast intervention, and probably benign findings detected on previous studies, among others [47][48][49]64,38,51,41,54,42,27]; two of them were specifically oriented to the detection of lesions in women with heterogeneously or extremely dense breasts [48,49], according to ACR categorization, and another one in to detect lesions in pathologically proven breast cancer studies [45]. Six aimed to evaluate the feasibility of using abbreviated protocols to screening high risk women [35,46,59,39,53,55]; and 7 others, to women with a personal or family history of breast cancer [71,36,43,37,58,44,60]. Additionally, 3 studies established as inclusion criteria to present lesions previously identified by another imaging modality [69,70,67]; and the other 4, focused on pathologically proven breast cancer studies [74,57,68,61].…”

Diagnostic validity of abbreviated breast MRI in the diagnosis of breast cancer: a comparative study to the full breast MRI protocol using BI-RADS

“…These results agree with our report. Moreover, many studies [ 20 , 21 ] recorded a shorter interpretation time of AP than FDP (6 m 58 s vs. 14 m 48 s and 1 m 9 s vs. 2 m 30 s, respectively).…”

How much can abbreviated protocols for breast MRI increase patient throughput? a multi-centric evaluation

“…As a possible solution, abbreviating breast MRI protocols to the necessary minimum has been increasingly popular among the breast imaging community in recent years. Articles published so far mainly focused on demonstrating similar diagnostic performance, specifically sensitivity, while assessing the clinical impact of abbreviated protocols by their shortened examination or reading times, but did not investigate to what degree this reduction is reflected in clinical practice [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…The introduction of breast MRI as a large-scale screening examination, even if for subpopulations only, requires ways to increase patient throughput, while still conserving its diagnostic performance, most important sensitivity. Abbreviation of breast MRI protocols by removing sequences not essential for cancer detection has been a trend in the past decade, pushing scan time (ST) down to a minimum of three minutes per exam, therefore being a potential solution to the stated conceived problem of patient throughput [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Evidence on the actual impact of scan time reduction on patient throughput is however scarce and a related retrospective study performed on this matter revealed a discrepancy between expected and actual increase in patient flow, most likely owed to non-scan related activities [16].…”