Bright Star Elementary School wants to welcome you to a new school year and a brand new web space for the BSES community. Not every woman with breast cancer needs a breast MRI.Your PAR ID can be found on most letters sent from California Child Support Services to case participants, usually at the. Ultimately, the decision to have a breast MRI must be made between you and your physician. And this also usually puts you into a state of anxiety.īreast MRIs need to be used judiciously, but when they are used for can help us tremendously. A breast MRI is not likely to miss a cancer, but it will identify many lesions that are not cancers, but nonetheless, compel us to do a biopsy. The major downside to a breast MRI is what we call false positive. BI-RADS 5 he states that the lesion in question is a cancer until proven otherwise.īreast MRI is an excellent tool to help us evaluate the breast and to determine if a malignancy is present. BI-RADS 4 is suspicious and biopsy should be considered. BI-RADS 3 states that the findings are greater than 98% benign but a six-month follow-up is warranted to confirm stability and has benign behavior. BI-RADS 2 states that the findings are completely benign. The radiologist will typically leave a verbal description and will end with a BI-RADS. Ultimately, you must read the radiologist impression. Likewise, type I enhancement is typically, but not always benign. Thus, if your MRI report describes type III enhancement, then there is concerned that that lesion could be malignant. Type II and has been in which there is moderate uptake and moderate washout is indeterminate. Type I enhancement is a very slow uptake of the gadolinium and very little washout. Likewise, the gadolinium will get washed out from the cancer much more quickly than from Normal Healthy Breast Tissue. Because breast cancers have many blood vessels they will enhance early, that is much more gadolinium will surround the breast cancer than normal healthy breast tissue. The enhancement itself, however, can also give a clue to the behavior of the lesion. If the mass is smooth it is more likely benign and if it is irregular it is more likely to be cancer. If an enhancing mass is identified, first the radiologist will look at the morphology, that is the shape of the mass.

Those are the first signs that the cancer may be present. On your report, the radiologist may describe enhancement or may describe an enhancing mass. Therefore the MRI can see these blood vessels around the breast cancer and you actually can see the breast cancer. Breast cancers because many new blood vessels to develop in these new blood vessels will develop and surround the breast cancer. This gadolinium will highlight and make the blood vessels much more visible. When you have an MRI, the intrinsic venous line is started you are given the contrast material called gadolinium. So how do you read and interpret your MRI report? First, we have to understand that an MRI is really just looking at blood vessels. Annual breast MRI in these situations will have a positive impact by identifying the breast cancer when it is very small and presumably more easily treatable. The other situation in which breast MRI is effective is when someone has a known genetic mutation putting them at increased risk for breast cancer or if they have a greater than 20% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer based on their family history. In these situations, the breast MRI will provide me with more information that may impact treatment decisions. However, I will order breast MRI in someone with breast cancer if their mammogram is dense, if there is a suggestion of more extensive disease or if there is a strong family history of breast cancer suggesting a possible genetic mutation. There is no data, that is there are no definitive studies that demonstrate that a breast MRI improved survival or reduces local recurrence in the treatment of breast cancer. If you have cancer, many physicians will order a breast MRI for you. Likewise, if there is an abnormality on the mammogram it may need further evaluation with a breast MRI. A mammogram may be unclear if the mammogram is dense, that is if the report of your mammogram describes heterogeneously dense breast or extremely dense breast. Breast MRIs are used to either add additional information to mammography when a mammogram is unclear. And therefore they are not used as a screening tool.

However, breast MRIs are also the most expensive method to evaluate the breast. An MRI of the breast is perhaps the best method we have to evaluate your breasts for the presence of a cancer.

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