Contrast-enhanced MRI has been proven to be a very sensitive modality for the early diagnosis of breast cancer in young women and/or in women with radiographically-dense breasts. The American Cancer Society recommends that high-risk women with lifetime risk greater than 20% should receive annual breast MRI screening. Depending on the practitioner and study characteristics, MRI may have a high false positive rate (with specificity reported as low as 81%), which can lead to many unnecessary procedures or even over-treatment. Positron emission mammography (PEM), the breast-specific high-resolution molecular imaging system originally invented by the PI of the submitted proposal, has been demonstrated to have a high negative predictive value. Integrating a PEM system into MRI for combined imaging is therefore likely to increase diagnostic accuracy. Furthermore, the recent commercialization of PET/CT and PET/MR clinical systems has led to wide acceptance in the oncology community for combined anatomic and molecular imaging. The goal of this application is therefore to design and construct a PEM system that could be used in conjunction with an MRI scanner. The developed PEM/MRI system in this project could be used in cancer detection, in personalizing care for breast cancer patients, and in the development of new drugs for prevention and therapy.
The goal of this application is therefore to design and construct a molecular breast imaging system that could be used in conjunction with an MRI scanner. The system could be used in breast cancer detection, in personalizing care for breast cancer patients, and in the development of new drugs for prevention and therapy.
