Kennedy ED, et al. - Researchers conducted a phase 2 study investigating the utility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for selecting patients with “good prognosis” rectal tumors for primary surgery and for safely avoiding preoperative chemoradiotherapy. From 12 hospitals across Canada, they included 82 patients with MRI-predicted good prognosis rectal cancer. Following primary surgery, these patients had a positive circumferential resection margin rate of 4.9% (4 of 82). These findings revealed an achievement of a low rate of positive circumferential resection margin in correlation to using MRI criteria to select good prognosis patients with rectal cancer for primary surgery and indicate that all patients with stage II and III rectal cancer may not require chemoradiotherapy.