Value of an abbreviated protocol of breast magnetic resonance imaging for screening moderate/high-risk patients.

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common among women worldwide, accounting for 16% of all female cancers. More women are diagnosed with breast cancer than any other cancer and it has again become the leading cause of cancer worldwide, displacing lung cancer (1). In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 2.2 million new cases and 685,000 women died as a result of this disease., About one in 12 women will develop breast cancer throughout their life. Early detection remains the best strategy to improve the prognosis of breast cancer, and mammography remains the method of early detection in women over 35 years of age, with a sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 92% in the general population. Different studies have shown that mammography screening has an effect on breast cancer mortality. Despite this, mammography has shown poor performance in detecting cancer in patients with dense breast tissue, to counteract this problem, other imaging modalities have been proposed, such as tomosynthesis, which is a variation of the mammography that generates three-dimensional images, breast ultrasound, which is useful as a complementary study, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is currently proposed as an effective alternative for detection in the high-risk population.