Visual Evaluation of Ultrafast MRI in the Assessment of Residual Breast Cancer after Neoadjuvant Systemic Therapy: A...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the diagnostic performance of ultrafast dynamic contrast-enhanced (UF-DCE) MRI after the completion of neoadjuvant systemic therapy (NST) in breast cancer. In this study, MR examinations of 55 post-NST breast cancers were retrospectively analyzed. Residual tumor sizes were measured in the 20th phase of UF-DCE MRI, early and delayed phases of conventional dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI, and high spatial-resolution contrast enhanced MRI (UF, early, delayed, and HR, respectively). The diagnostic performance for the detection of residual invasive cancer was calculated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The size difference between MRI and pathological findings was analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test with the Bonferroni correction. The overall area under the ROC curve (AUC) was highest for UF (0.86 and 0.88 for readers 1 and 2, respectively). The difference in imaging and pathological sizes for UF (5.7 ± 8.2 mm) was significantly smaller than those for early, delayed, and HR (p < 0.01). For luminal subtype breast cancer, the size difference was significantly smaller for UF and early than for delayed (p < 0.01). UF-DCE MRI demonstrated higher AUC and specificity for the more accurate detection of residual cancer and the visualization of tumor extent than conventional DCE MRI.