ROLE OF DIFFUSION -WEIGHTED IMAGING (DWI) AND APPARENT DIFFUSION COEFFICIENT (ADC) IN THE DIAGNOSIS OF BREAST CANCER

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most prevalent and is the leading cause of cancer related deaths among women worldwide. The early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer is crucial for treatment and to improve the quality of life. There is several imaging modalities for diagnosis of breast lesions. Conventional imaging modalities as mammography and ultrasound remain the method of choice for routine screening programs and are the first imaging aid, but conventional assessment have well-known limitations, such as inaccurate differentiation between benign and malignant lesions and estimation of the size of malignant tumors. The sensitivity of breast MRI for the detection of cancer is the greatest of all imaging techniques but when the sensitivity of the MRI was high, its specificity was low due to overlap in features of benign and malignant lesions, so new technique such as dynamic contrast enhancement and diffusion weighted imagehas been added to conventional MRI study aiming at increasing its specificity. In our study we had 20 patients with suggesting breast malignant lesions based on conventional MRI, dynamic curves, diffusion weighted image and ADC values were obtained for all patients and compared with histopathological results with a sensitivity and accuracy of 85%.