Painful bone marrow biopsies could be replaced with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology when scanning for a cancer called myeloma.
"Whole-body, diffusion-weighted" MRIs could show the spread of bone marrow cancer in patients suffering from myeloma, a common form of blood cancer, an Institute of Cancer Research news release reported.
"This is the first time we've been able to obtain information from all the bones in the entire body for myeloma in one scan without having to rely on individual bone X-rays. It enables us to measure the involvement of individual bones and follow their response to treatment," Professor Nandita deSouza, Professor of Translational Imaging at The Institute of Cancer Research and Honorary Consultant at The Royal Marsden, said in the news release.
In a recent study 26 patients were given whole-body, diffusion-weighted MRI scans both before and after treatment. Doctors were able to determine whether or not the patients had responded to treatment 86 percent of the time; they could also tell which patients had not responded to treatment about 80 percent of the time.
The new technique also allowed the medical researchers to pinpoint exactly where the cancer was in the bone marrow with immediate results.
"The results can be [visualized] immediately; we can look on the screen and see straight away where the cancer is and measure how severe it is. The scan is better than blood tests, which don't tell us in which bones the cancer is located. It also reduces the need for uncomfortable biopsies, which don't reveal the extent or severity of the disease," deSouza said.
The research team used a type of measurement called the Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) to show where the cancer is in the bones. This type of measurement was able to pinpoint treatment responses in 25 of the 26 study participants.
The skull was the only bone that proved to be difficult to image. The new method was able to treat patients more efficiently; in several cases bone marrow biopsies were found to be unfit for analysis.
"Finding kinder ways to monitor how patients respond to treatment is really important, particularly in the case of myeloma where taking bone marrow samples can be painful. This research demonstrates how an advanced imaging technique could provide a whole-skeleton 'snapshot' to track the response of [tumors] in individual bones," Julia Frater, Cancer Research UK's Senior Cancer Information Nurse, said in the news release.
