Hot Topics in Breast MRI
Member-Initiated Symposium

ORGANIZERS: Linda Moy

Wednesday, 20 June 2018

Session Number: MIS-18

Overview
Breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for screening, pre-operative staging, and therapy control. However, its ability to provide diagnostic, prognostic and predictive information has not been fully exploited. In this symposium, we will discuss new frontiers, focusing on the integration of advanced techniques with systems biology, aiming at precision medicine. While the symposium focuses on breast cancer, the discussed concepts are applicable to all fields of oncological imaging. 
In screening, simply finding more cancers is not enough. The challenge is to identify clinically relevant cancers early and accurately, while minimizing the costs and limiting exposure to contrast agents. When a cancer is detected, in addition to definition of disease extent both locally and systemically, understanding of tumor biology and the identification of possible targets for treatment is pivotal. Ultrahigh-field MRI further sparks the possibilities for assessment of tumor biology by depicting the cancer structure in unrivalled spatial detail, and by providing sufficient signal for multi-nuclei spectroscopic analysis of the tumor and the surrounding stroma. The emerging field of radiogenomics integrates imaging phenotypes with the heterogeneous mutational landscape of tumors using advanced machine learning techniques to identify spatially resolved predictive and prognostic imaging biomarkers to improve patient outcomes.

Target Audience
This course is aimed at radiologists and imaging scientists who wish to learn about advanced breast MRI and emerging MRI techniques in this field.

Educational Objectives
As a result of attending this course, participants should be able to:
- Implement and interpret dedicated ultrafast and non-contrast MRI techniques for breast screening, recognize the technical challenges and discuss the relationship of imaging findings with biological cancer profiles;
- Identify current approaches of local and distant staging with multiparametric whole body (WB) MRI and simultaneous PET/MRI;
- Recognize the incremental value of imaging at ultra-high field strengths for breast cancer characterization and therapy monitoring; and
- Describe the technique, aim, current applications, challenges and value of radiogenomics in breast cancer.