Christiane Katharina Kuhl - Biography#

Since 05/2010, Christiane serves as director and chairperson of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at RWTH Aachen University Hospital (UKA), one of Germany’s excellence universities. In addition to her ample clinical duties as a diagnostic and interventional radiologist, Christiane’s mission is to improve risk-adjusted early diagnosis and stage-adjusted treatment of breast cancer, and thus to improve women's health globally. Her career has been dedicated to advancing breast imaging to enhance outcomes of individuals with breast cancer - as well as to avoiding unnecessary burden to individuals who don't. Christiane obtained her medical degree from Bonn University in 1991, started her residency in 1992, and became a board-certified radiologist in 1999. Her Habilitation (2000) was on the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques for diagnosis of breast cancer. Over the last 3 decades and ongoing, she has consistently provided groundbreaking, practice changing research that has been incorporated in cancer imaging and screening guidelines world-wide. Among them a landmark study that introduced DCE-MRI for differential diagnosis of breast cancer (Radiology 1999, cited over 2.000 times (10.1148/radiology.211.1.r99ap38101). She pioneered the use of MRI for diagnosis of precursors of breast cancer (DCIS), published in The Lancet in 2006; 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61232-X). She pioneered the use of MR imaging for women with familial breast cancer by the first original article on this topic (Radiology 2000; 10.1148/radiology.215.1.r00ap01267), and then conducted several large multicenter clinical trials on screening women at different individual risk levels, including the EVA trial (JCO 2005; 10.1200/JCO.2004.00.4960 and JCO 2010; 10.1200/JCO.2009.23.0839), and the ECOG/ACRIN EA1141 trial (JAMA 2020; 10.1001/jama.2020.0572). She revolutionized the clinical application of MR imaging by introducing the concept of abbreviated MRI (inaugurated in JCO 2014; 10.1200/JCO.2013.52.5386), in order to improve access to high-precision imaging for screening and diagnosis.