OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether early kinetic parameters derived from ultrafast dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) using compressed sensing are associated with prognostic factors for breast cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS. We evaluated 201 consecutive women (mean age, 54.6 years) with breast cancer (168 invasive, 33 ductal carcinoma in situ) who underwent both ultrafast DCE-MRI using compressed sensing (temporal resolution, 4.7 seconds; spatial resolution, 0.8 × 1.1 × 0.9 mm) and surgery between 2018 and 2019. Early kinetic parameters (time to enhancement [TTE] and maximum slope [MS]) were measured in breast lesions by two radiologists using a software program and were correlated with histopathologic prognostic factors. The Mann-Whitney U test and linear regression analysis were used. RESULTS. The median TTE and MS values for breast cancer were 11.9 seconds and 7.7%/s, respectively. The median MS was significantly larger in invasive cancer lesions than in ductal carcinoma in situ lesions (8.4%/s vs 4.7%/s, p < .001). In women with invasive cancer, multivariate linear regression analyses showed that a larger tumor size (> 2 cm) (p = .048) and estrogen receptor-negative status (p < .001) were significantly associated with a shorter TTE. A higher histologic grade (grade 3) (p = .01) was significantly associated with a larger MS. We observed excellent interobserver agreement between two readers in the measurements of TTE and MS (intraclass correlation coefficients, 0.943 and 0.890, respectively). CONCLUSION. Ultrafast MRI-derived early enhancement parameters, such as TTE and MS, are associated with histopathologic prognostic factors in women with breast cancer.
Keywords: MRI; breast; cancer; kinetics; prognosis.