MRI-guided ablation of breast cancer: where do we stand today?

The treatment of patients with localized breast cancer has changed considerably over the past few decades. The next challenge is to use image-guided minimally invasive tumor ablation techniques. The fact that MRI is the most accurate imaging modality for visualization and delineation of breast tumor margins in three dimensions and provides MRI-based temperature mapping, makes it particularly applicable for monitoring during minimally invasive ablation techniques. The overall result of the studies performed on MRI-guided minimally invasive tumor ablation studies are varying, with reported total tumor ablation rates ranging between 20% and 100%. Strict selection of patients, consensus on the treatment zone margin and optimization of MR-imaging, should make MRI-guided breast cancer tumor ablation a useful tool in clinical practice.