Sunitha B. Thakur1, David D. Dershaw2,
Dilip Giri3, Junting Zheng4, Chaya Moskowitz, Jessica
Ferrara2, Jason A. Koutcher1, Elizabeth A. Morris2
1Medical Physics, Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States; 2Radiology,
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States; 3Pathology,
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States; 4Epidemiology-Biostatistics,
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States
Treatment
decisions and determination of breast cancer prognosis have traditionally
been based on pathologic parameters such as tumorsize and axillary-nodal
status, tumor-grade, and the results of tumor markers mainly ER/PR and
HER-2/neu. Here we present the clinical usefulness of Diffusion-weighted MRI
and measurement of apparent diffusion coefficients (ADCs) to correlate
traditional markers such as histology and molecular markers such as ER, PR
and HER-2. Mean tumor size is
significantly higher in patients with positive lymph nodes. Although ADC
values represent a valuable biomarker for detecting malignant lesions, the
ADC cannot be a prognostic indicator for patients with breast cancer.
Keywords