Dear Women's Imaging Insider,
Deciding on the optimum recall rate in breast cancer screening is no easy task. While it's essential to avoid overburdening staff and causing unnecessary anxiety for women, conducting a thorough, safe, and complete assessment of every patient must remain the top priority.
New U.K. research in this area looks set to generate much interest. A group from Manchester found that clinical recalls without additional demographic abnormality do not yield a sufficiently high cancer detection rate to justify the recalls, and the authors think it's feasible to reduce numbers in assessment clinics. Don't miss our news report.
Another recent study published in BJR focuses on how elastography can help in the battle against breast cancer. The investigators think that strain wave elastography is an effective modality for assessing each cycle of chemotherapy in women with locally advanced breast cancer, and it is a useful tool to predict chemoresponse early during the course of management, thereby providing a valuable window to change treatment protocols.
Breast MRI continues to attract attention too. An article in the August issue of the European Journal of Radiology has shown that preoperative breast MRI features such as multifocal disease and a nonmass enhancement lesion can help predict positive or close margins at breast-conserving surgery.
The incidence of cervical cancer continues to rise sharply in many countries, but hybrid imaging promises to assist in an increasing number of cases. In a new analysis, researchers combined FDG-PET with a T2-weighted MRI voxel segmentation method and gray-level adjustments to significantly improve accuracy, sensitivity, and negative predictive value, compared with MRI alone, in diagnosing and staging parametrial infiltration in cervical cancer.
The imaging of ovarian cancer came under the spotlight at the 2019 World Congress on obstetrics and gynecology. A team from Northern Ireland found that FDG-PET/CT is more accurate than contrast-enhanced CT for detecting primary ovarian cancer, but due to CT's wide availability, cost-effectiveness, and quick interpretation by junior radiologists, CT is preferred on a daily basis.
Please head over to the Women's Imaging Community at AuntMinnieEurope.com for more on noteworthy events and research, and feel free to send me details about any topics you'd like to see covered in the weeks to come.
