Correlation of apparent diffusion coefficient values and peritumoral edema with pathologic biomarkers in patients...

To investigate the relationship between breast cancer imaging features on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and histopathological characteristics.

We prospectively enrolled 46 patients who underwent 1.5-T MRI with 68 breast malignant lesions from 2017 until 2019. Peritumoral edema was determined based on visual assessment on T2 weighted imaging. Lesions were categorized into two groups: A: with edema (48 lesions) and B: without edema (20 lesions).

The tumor size was not different among two groups but multifocal-multicentric lesions were more common in the group A (70% vs. 35%). The axillary lymph nodes are most involved in group A. ER and PR positive lesions were more common in group B (90% vs. 56.3%) but in the group A, HER2 positive lesions were found to be more common (31.3% vs. 15%). The mean ADC value in tumors and peritumoral regions were lower (0.97 × 10^-3 mm²/s, P = 0.023) and higher (1.85 × 10^-3 mm²/s, P < 0.0001) in group A, respectively. Peritumoral ADC value was significantly higher in HER2-positive group.

Breast carcinomas with peritumoral edema were found to be more multifocal-multicentric, with higher prevalence of axillary lymph node involvement, more HER 2-positive, with lower prevalence of ER/PR-positive, lower tumoral ADC and higher peritumoral ADC values.