Axillary Staging in Early Breast Cancer: SNB vs PET/MRI

The gold standard of surgical treatment for patients with early breast cancer (BC) is breast conservation and sentinel node biopsy (SNB). Ongoing randomized trials are evaluating to omit surgery at all when axillary imaging is negative. However, the available diagnostic tools still have several limitations in accuracy. Combining the specificity of PET, with the superior sensitivity of MRI, hybrid PET/MRI might be a non-invasive, one-stage, operator-independent imaging method to accurately define nodal status and, whenever negative, might replace surgery for axillary staging. The project includes patients with \2 mm). Additionally, general concordance and diagnostic accuracy of PET/MRI vs SNB, eventual correlation with BC molecular subtypes and MRI findings will be evaluated.