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Breast MRI Case 7

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We're going to look at case 8 here.

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And the history on this patient is

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that she is going...

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She is a...

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Okay, so she has...

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She's a 43-year-old woman who is six months

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after diagnosis of right breast invasive ductal carcinoma.

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And she has status post, right-sided lumpectomy and right-sided radiation

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treatment, which she's just completed a couple of months ago.

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So I'm going to show you here her

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subtraction on the right and her gadolinium enhanced image on the left.

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I'm going to give them a moment to just load up there.

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So let me come up and show you two things.

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So the right breast is the breast that was treated.

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The left breast was not treated.

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So I want you to look, first of all, at the left breast and we'll talk about

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the right breast afterwards, but this case is actually about the left breast.

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I'm going to scroll through here.

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Okay, that's a little strange because what I was looking at is no longer on these images.

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I may have loaded up the wrong one.

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I do apologize.

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Well, while we're here...

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Oh, there we go.

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Okay.

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So, looking at the right-hand image,

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which is the gadolinium plus,

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compared to the left-hand image,

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which is a subtraction.

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Looking at the left breast only.

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And the abnormality I want you to focus on

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is this high signal stuff in the retroareolar area.

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So let's have the question for that one.

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Just showing you the T2 on the left now.

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Okay, good. This is ductal ectasia.

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Now, the reason it's ductal ectasia,

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although it's not high on T2 signal, and some will have high signal on T2

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and some won't, depends on the protein content.

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You can see that this has

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very high signal conforming to a diffuse ductal pattern with the ducts dilated.

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But they're very smooth.

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Okay. There's no lumps and bumps here,

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there's no clumps.

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They're just smoothly distended ducts filled with high signal material.

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The key is, when we looked at the subtraction image,

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that there was no

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increased signal within that high signal.

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So in other words, the gadolinium

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minus image have the same

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high signal within it as did the gadolinium post.

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So if you see this,

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you've got to make sure that you look very carefully at the pre-gad.

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This is the pre-gad image now that I'm showing you

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on the left hand side to see if you saw the same abnormality.

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Now, one thing that can really catch you out here when you're doing this clinically

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is if the patient moves a little bit between the pre and post-gad images,

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that subtraction is going to show you what looks like ductal enhancement.

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So you need to make sure you look at the pre-gad images with the post-gad images,

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not just a subtraction, to ensure that you're not being mistaken into that.

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Let's just see if we can come up to here. There you go.

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And you can see the... Here's...

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Oh, that's not a gad minus. I'm sorry.

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This is both gads, but you would see exactly the same on the minus gad.

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So duct enhancement is going to be bright on both the pre and post-gads.

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It shouldn't show on the subtraction,

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but it may show on a subtraction if you do not have...

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if you have movement.

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Now, the other thing I just wanted to show you in this patient is note how her

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right breast is...

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got skin thickening and it has enhancement.

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This patient, as I said,

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was only a couple of months after their radiotherapy.

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And so in this case, seeing enhancement here is not concerning.

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We expect to see diffuse enhancement in the breast, particularly in the area,

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the tumor bed when it's this close to the surgical period.

Report

Faculty

Petra J Lewis, MBBS

Professor of Radiology and OBGYN

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center & Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

Tags

MRI

Implants

Breast

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