Pre-therapeutic MRI Assessment of Early-Stage Rectal Cancer and Significant Rectal Polyps to Avoid Major Resectional Surgery

When someone is diagnosed with a lump (polyp) or cancer in their bowel, doctors use MRI scans to understand how deeply it has grown. This is really important because it helps them decide the best way to treat it. If a cancer is very early and has only grown a little way into the bowel wall, it can often be removed with a much simpler local procedure. This type of surgery only takes out the lump and leaves most of the bowel untouched, helping patients recover faster and avoid the bigger risks and lifestyle changes associated with major surgery.

However, it's quite common for scans to not clearly show these early cancers. This means some patients end up having bigger operations or treatments like radiotherapy that they might not actually need. Our team has created a new, more precise way for the doctors who read MRI scans (called radiologists) to spot these early cancers. We've found that this new method is much better at identifying early bowel cancers – it can find about 9 out of 10, compared to only 3 out of 10 with current methods. We've also proven that we can teach other radiologists this new skill.

In this first step, we're going to train radiologists in 20 different hospitals across the UK. We'll then look at their scan reports before and after the training to see if the new method leads to better, more accurate information for patients. Most importantly, we want to see if more patients are then offered and choose these simpler, local procedures. The information we gather will be key to helping us get funding to make this training available to all NHS hospitals, helping many more patients get the right treatment from the start.