Breast MRI screening is associated with high direct and indirect costs. These, together with the lack of sites that offer high-level breast MRI, limit clinical access to screening MRIs.
One reason for the high cost is that current breast MRI protocols are time consuming to acquire and read. A typical MRI study occupies the MRI system for up to 40 minutes and generates several hundred images.
DCE-MRI allows the assessment of high-resolution breast morphology and enhancement kinetics to depict angiogenesis as a tumor-specific feature. At any given field strength, DCE-MRI is the most sensitive modality for breast cancer detection, with a pooled sensitivity of 93%; DCE-MRI has good pooled specificity of 71%.
With the abbreviated MRI protocol, the acquisition time was substantially decreased to 3 minutes, compared with 17 minutes for the full diagnostic protocol. The interpretation time of the abbreviated protocol was 28 seconds on average and 2.8 seconds when the MIP image alone was evaluated.
