Hospital to receive new MRI enhancement device

Managing breast cancer treatment in Thunder Bay will get decidedly easier in August with the addition of a $185,000 MRI enhancement device at the Regional Health Sciences Centre.

Officials at the hospital and the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute said the Sentinelle Vanguard Breast MRI Coil is already being used at leading-edge treatment facilities around the world will vastly improve patient care in Northwestern Ontario.

Radiologist Neety Panu said the new equipment, being paid for through a grant from the Thunder Bay Regional Hospital Foundation, will help launch the hospital’s Linda Buchan Centre into a comprehensive breast-imaging centre.

"What it means for patients is we will be able to look at the full extent of the disease, which is really great, so that we know the management that we undertake is the best possible management from Day 1," Panu said.

"We can look at how patients respond to chemotherapy, which is very important. We can look at if there’s disease in the other breast and we can certainly look at patients who are at high risks for screening."

The younger a patent is for screening, she added, the less effective traditional low-dose radiation mammography techniques are because of higher breast density. Breast MRI also allows images to be taken at various angles and sensitive to small abnormalities that might otherwise be missed.

Statistics show the institution of breast MRI should have a positive effect on survival rates and decrease recurrence rates, Panu said.

"We hope to grab things at an earlier stage, so I think overall we can predict a more positive outcome, but it’s hard to put an exact number on that," said Panu, who spent the past year learning breast MRI techniques at the world-famous Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York.

Cameron Piron, president of Sentinelle Medical said the 16-channel technology allows an MRI unit to be adapted to specialize in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, a process that’s been developed over the past dozen years.

"The workhorse for breast screening has always been mammography. It’s very effective. But what’s happened is a new technology using MRI, which is no radiation, is in fact more sensitive for detecting earlier cancers. This is a very significant advancement in the fight against breast cancer," Piron said.

Michael Power vice-president of regional cancer and diagnostic services and TBRRI CEO, called the addition of the technology a significant one, noting that 200 women are diagnosed with breast cancer at the hospital each year.

Roughly 2,000 go through the diagnosis stage, while 11,000 women are screened for the disease.

"A new clinical pathway introduced at the hospital this fall will determine the real number of patients that will benefit from breast MRI technology, but it will be considerable," Power said.

The move will also strengthen TBRRI’s standing in the research world, he added, possibly leading to revenue-generating research of their own.