Dr. Elizabeth Sutton, a breast imaging radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), will provide details of a two-year pilot study that enrolled 15 women with biopsy-confirmed operable invasive breast cancer. The patients underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy, had an MRI scan before and after treatment, experienced a complete response to therapy, and had planned to undergo surgery at MSKCC.
Physicians performed MRI-guided biopsies without intravenous contrast on the treated tumor beds of all 15 patients to determine the efficacy of the chemotherapy. They also estimated the negative predictive value of the biopsies using a breast surgery sample as the reference standard.
The accuracy of MRI biopsies was almost 100%, with only one incorrect result, in which surgical pathology identified 0.2 mm of invasive disease as a true positive. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were all greater than 80%.
The researchers concluded that the accuracy of MRI-guided biopsy in diagnosing a pathological complete response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is very high and supports the need for a larger study.
