Sunday, November 30 | 10:30 a.m.-10:40 a.m. | S2-SSBR01-1 | Room S406A
An abbreviated breast MRI protocol appears comparable to a full one for identifying cancer in women with the BRCA gene mutation, according to research to be presented Sunday morning.
The results suggest that “abbreviated MRI can be a time-efficient and resource-saving alternative for high-risk breast cancer screening without compromising diagnostic performance,” reported a team led by Wendelien Sanderink, PhD, of Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Sanderink and colleagues investigated the accuracy of a shortened breast MRI protocol for identifying cancer in this population via a study that included 1,058 women with the BRCA mutation who underwent two screening rounds of breast MRI between January 2012 and December 2024.
Of the study cohort, 661 women underwent 1,504 shortened MRI exams and 790 women underwent 2,905 full-protocol exams.
Overall, the group found that the two protocols were not statistically significantly different for both the first and second screening rounds, although the shortened protocol did find smaller tumors (5.7 mm compared with 11.4 mm).
The takeaway?
“Abbreviated breast MRI protocols provide a comparable cancer detection rate to full diagnostic protocols in BRCA mutation carriers, suggesting that abbreviated MRI can be a time-efficient and resource-saving alternative for high-risk breast cancer screening without compromising diagnostic performance,” Sanderink and colleagues concluded.