• Breast cancer early diagnosis and detection with an application of magnetic resonance spectroscopy
  • Abolfazl Koozari,1,* Mohammadreza Elhaie,2 Iraj Abedi,3
    1. Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences
    2. Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences
    3. Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences


  • Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Early diagnosis is critical for cancer treatment planning. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has excellent contrast resolution, which can be of great importance for the detection of breast neoplasms. Multiparametric magnetic resonance-based techniques such as dynamic contrast-enhancement magnetic resonance (DCE-MRI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), and magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) have the potential to organize patients according to pathology or their responses to treatment and improve clinical results. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is an important tool that provides information about the biochemical composition and typifies the metabolic state of malignant, benign, and normal breast tissues. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of magnetic resonance spectroscopy on the early detection of breast cancer.
  • Methods: This search was conducted in the Google Scholar database using the following keywords: “breast” and” cancer” detection” and” diagnosis” and “magnetic resonance spectroscopy” or “MRS”. We limited the publication period to 2022 to evaluate the most recent literature. We also used the PubMed database for additional literature searches. References to related articles were also included in this paper. After reading the abstracts, we manually selected relevant articles for this study.
  • Results: In the 4510 articles that we found by searching scientific websites, we limited our results to 27 papers based on the inclusion values. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a noninvasive imaging modality often applied to evaluate the metabolic data inside a marked tissue by showing a spike in specific metabolites, such as total choline (tCho). MRS is often used to discover and detect other metabolites, such as lipids because aberrations in lipid metabolism are related to cancer growth. Elevated tCho levels have been reported in malignant tumors, and combining lipid investigation with the tCho peak in MRS to detect breast cancer presented higher sensitivity compared to the situation where only one of them was deliberate.
  • Conclusion: Various studies have shown that MRS has sufficient sensitivity and accuracy to distinguish benign from malignant lesions. MRS performed at a higher field increases the sensitivity of tCho detection with better resolution. This study demonstrated the significant role of MRS in the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer lesions.
  • Keywords: breast cancer, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, detection