Comparison To Other Technologies
The available literature suggests that the sensitivity of contrast-enhanced breast MRI in detection of cancer is considerably higher than that of either radiographic mammography or ultrasound and is generally reported to be in excess of 95% (though not all reported studies have been as encouraging).
The specificity (the confidence that a lesion is cancerous and not a false positive) is only fair, thus a positive finding by MRI should not be interpreted as a definitive diagnosis.
The reports of 4,271 breast MRIs from eight large scale clinical trials were reviewed recently by CD Lehman. Overall the sensitivity ranged from 71% to 100% in these reports, however the call-back rates were low at 10% and the risk of having a benign biopsy was reported at 5%, a significant improvement over mammography.
Current indications for breast MRI include but are not limited to the screening of high-risk patients (such as those with a personal or strong family history of breast cancer), evaluation of breast implants in cases of suspected implant rupture, and pre-treatment evaluation of patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer to assess the extent of the disease)
Read more about this topic: Breast MRI
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