Interactive Transcript
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Our next patient is a 42 year old woman with
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a recent diagnosis of left breast cancer,
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and MRI is being performed to assess extent of disease.
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So here's the patient's MIP,
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and you can see that there's a large enhancing mass here,
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posteriorly in the left breast and some lymph nodes, bilaterally.
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She has a lot of little foci in both breasts,
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likely related to background parenchymal enhancement.
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We'll take a look at our T1 and our subtraction series.
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And we can see that she has heterogeneous background
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parenchymal enhancement, or background tissue.
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And then she has a moderate background
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parenchymal enhancement.
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But a lot of this is just scattered foci,
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nothing really suspicious.
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Then we get into this enhancing mass.
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There's artifact from a biopsy clip internally.
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And surprisingly,
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you know,
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sometimes with a mass, this size will see
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abnormal lymph nodes,
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but her lymph nodes are normal in appearance,
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bilaterally.
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One thing that we always want to be aware of
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when we're looking at a breast cancer that's more medial,
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which this is,
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we want to be sure to check our internal
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mammary lymph nodes, which we did.
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And here they are, internal mammary artery and veins.
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We're going to follow those, and basically no
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visible lymph nodes.
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So really just the one cancer and some background.
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We can see this on T1-weighted series pre and post contrast.
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Nothing else that we can see there.
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And you can see based on how I'm
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reviewing these studies, that although we have
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all these series, we may not use them very much other than for
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kinetics or trying to figure something out.
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Our pre and post contrast series with our sub
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and our MIP are going to be the most important things
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that we look at with some contribution by the T1
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non-fat saturated and STIR sequences.
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And if you think about it,
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most abbreviated protocols at this point are
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T1-weighted pre and post contrast
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and maybe
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maybe a STIR or some sort of
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T2-weighted sequences added as well.
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But that, that forms the bulk of what we look at.
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And then the second and third and subsequent sequences
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after contrast are mostly to get information about kinetics.
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But I'm showing you the second and third sequence here,
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I don't think it contributes a whole lot to our
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overall understanding of this patient.
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Okay, so this was a BI-RADS 6.
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She only had the index mass and nothing
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else that we were worried about.
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