National Trends and Practices in Breast MRI

National Trends and Practices in Breast MRI
Lawrence W. Bassett, Sonia G. Dhaliwal, Jilbert Eradat, Omer Khan, Dionne F. Farria, R. James Brenner, and James W. Sayre
AJR 2008;191:332-339

Link to Journal

Radiologists qualified under the Mammography Quality Standards Act supervised the performance of and interpreted breast MRI in the majority of facilities. Of 552 respondents, breast MRI was interpreted as soft copy with computer-aided detection (CAD) in 280 practices (50.7%), as soft copy without CAD in 261 (47.3%), and as hard copy in 11 (2.0%). Of 551 respondents, 256 (46.5%) never and 207 (37.6%) rarely interpreted breast MRI without correlating mammography or sonography findings. The majority of respondents never (269/561, 48.0%) or rarely (165/561, 29.4%) interpreted breast MRI performed at an outside facility. Screening breast MRI was offered at 359 of 561 (64.0%) practices. Of the practices performing contrast-enhanced examinations, 173 of 557 (31.1%) did not perform MRI-guided interventional procedures.

Contrast-enhanced breast MRI is now widely used in the United States. The information gained from this survey should provide reasonable approaches for the development of professional practice guidelines