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pubmed:abstractText |
Combined therapies represent a staple of modern medicine. For women treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NA ChT) for locally advanced breast cancer (LABC), early determination of whether the patient will fail to respond can enable the use of alternative, more beneficial therapies. This is even more desirable when the combined therapy includes hyperthermia (HT), an efficient way to improve drug delivery, however, more costly and time consuming. There is data showing that this goal can be achieved using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with contrast agent (CA) enhancement. This work for the first time proposes combining the information extracted from pre-treatment MR imaging into a morpho-physiological tumour score (MPTS) with the hypothesis that this score will increase the prognostic efficacy, compared to each of its MR-derived components: morphological (derived from the shape of the tumour enhancement) and physiological (derived from the CA enhancement variance dynamics parameters). The MPTS was correlated with response as determined by both pathologic residual tumour and MRI imaging, and was shown to have potential to predict response. The MPTS was extracted from pre-treatment MRI parameters, so independent of the combined therapy used.
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