Principal Investigator: Nola Hylton
A major focus of the breast MRI research program is the development of tumor assessment methods for measuring response to neoadjuvant (pre-operative) chemotherapy. Our group has developed a high spacial resolution MRI methods that uses the signal enhancement ratio (SER) comparing early and late contrast enhancement, to characterize tumor vasculature. Tumor volumes are calculated based on SER thresholds and used to track tumor changes in response to treatment. The SER method has been used exclusively to estimate tumor pharmacokinetics without sacrificing spacial resolution or coverage and is being tested in the multi-center ACRIN trial 6657, "Contrast-enhanced Breast MRI for Evaluation of Patients Undergoing Neoadjuvant Treatment for Locally-advanced Breast Cancer." ACRIN 6657 is being performed as part of the national I-SPY trial, a collaborative trial of imaging and biomarkers for monitoring and guiding pre-operative treatment for women with breast cancer, led by Laura Esserman, Director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, and involving CALBG, ACRIN, the NCI InterSPORE program and the NCI Center for Bioinformatics. ACRIN 6657 successfully completed its original target accrual of 237 women with locally-advanced breast cancer and was amended and re-opened in 2007, adding magnetic resonance spectrospcopy (MRS) to MRI for early prediction of response to chemotherapy. We are continuing under our R01 funding to evaluate new techniques, including diffusion-weighted MRI and arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI for characterizing breast tissue, that can potentially move to the multi-center validation phase if promising in pilot studies. As an extension of our work in treatment response assessment, we are working with Sentinelle MedicalTM through an NIH/NCI funded academic-industrial partnership grant to develop a software module for real-time analysis of breast tumor response to treatment.
Funding Sources: NIH/NCI R01 CA 69587; ACRIN U01 CA 79778 S2; NIH/NCI R01 CA 132870