Imaging as a potential tool for subtyping breast cancer

摘要

Breast cancer is increasingly being recognized as a collection of different diseases. For many years, medical oncologists have been used to considering hormone receptor (HR) status, HER2 status and markers of the cancer cell cycle, together with tumor size and metastatic spread to the axillary lymph nodes, to infer on prognosis and to assign adjuvant treatments. While these single factors are still looked at in decision making in current clinical practice, a more complex classification, which has been suggested by pivotal multigene expression analysis studies, allows a better recapitulation of breast cancer heterogeneity.