In this project we aim to find clues from magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the normal breast to predict whether these women are likely to develop a non-dormant cancer. Whether a cancer should be considered “dormant” will be established by analyzing the genes inside the cancer tissue that these women developed. The effects of abnormal gene regulations on the biology of the cancers will be analysed and compared with the MRI. In the future we envision that one pre-screening MRI will result in individualized screening programs, tailored to the individual risk of the women, rather than the one-size-fits-all screening programs that are currently employed.
We have setup and tested the 7 Tesla MR imaging protocol that will be used for data collection with T2D patients and healthy controls. We have optimized image analyses methods to obtain high-resolution MR-based myelin-related cortical maps (see Figure).