Brain imaging screening in metastatic breast cancer: patients’ and physicians’ perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Routine brain imaging screening (BIS) in patients with metastatic breast cancer (BC) without neurological symptoms is currently not recommended, as no survival/quality-of-life improvements have been demonstrated. We aimed to examine physicians and patients' attitudes and perceptions toward BIS. METHODS: International cross-sectional online survey for patients and physicians, distributed from May 2023 to February 2024. Patients with BC diagnosis were deemed eligible for patients' survey completion and BC-treating physicians were invited to fill the physicians' questionnaire. RESULTS: A total of 529 physicians from 50 countries (80 % European) responded, mostly medical oncologists (70 %) working in academic hospitals (53 %). Most physicians request BIS (65 %), mainly when extracranial progression occurs, especially for HER2+ and triple negative BC (TNBC). Among physicians never performing BIS (35 %), 91 % would in case of proved clinical benefit. A total of 545 patients from 14 European countries completed the questionnaire. Median age was 50 years, 86 % had metastatic BC, 51 % hormone receptor-positive (HR+)/HER2-negative, 30 % HER2-positive (HER2+) and 19 % TNBC. BM were diagnosed in 11.5 % patients with metastatic BC. 85 % patients would like to undergo BIS, especially younger ones (p = 0.02) and with HR-disease (p = 0.03), despite the uncertain clinical benefit. Notably, 91 % of patients would like to receive information regarding BM, while only 13 % of physicians routinely address the issue. CONCLUSIONS: These results underline the willingness of patients to know more about the prospects of BM development, in contrast to the lack of routine discussion of this topic by physicians. Further investigation is warranted to demonstrate the clinical utility of routine BIS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".