Inventor Profiles

Research area Dr. Strigel is an expert in breast MRI techniques, clinical interpretation, and the use and performance of breast MRI in clinical practice. Her research is in novel breast MRI techniques to improve diagnostic performance, inform risk predication, and increase patient access to breast MRI. She develops advanced MRI techniques for breast cancer detection, imaging of tumor biology and metabolism, and evaluation of breast cancer response to therapy. She is also working with colleagues to develop novel MRI biomarkers for quantitative risk prediction and the use of novel MRI sequences to standardize high-quality MRI performance.

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What excites you about your work? 

“I get excited to use my technology background in engineering and physics in combination with my clinical role in breast imaging, which is what led me to MRI in the first place. It is motivating to me to see patients in clinic and hear about their family history of breast cancer, then think about how MRI can help us identify women at higher risk for breast cancer and find cancers early, when breast cancers are the most treatable. Advances in MRI and technology and the opportunity to use those advances to improve the care of patients is particularly exciting to me. I also get to work with great collaborators in radiology, physics, and engineering, which is really fun.”

What do you hope to achieve? 

“I hope to use breast MRI as a tool to diagnose and understand breast cancers, but also to help better define an individual woman’s risk for breast cancer, using MRI-specific features of breast tissue. I think that, in the future, MRI will have a role in risk prediction to inform appropriate screening modalities and intervals. I hope that we can personalize screening algorithms to an individual woman’s risk for breast cancer and most effective screening methods, and I think MRI is part of the solution. That’s what motivates me.”

Dr. Strigel is advancing breast cancer detection by utilizing MRI to identify risk factors and detect cancer within patients earlier. We appreciate her innovative work and continued partnership with WARF.

– Jeanine Burmania, WARF, Senior Director, IP and Licensing