mammography

Routine mammography screening, widely considered crucial in early breast cancer detection, may in fact be doing its job too well.

It turns out that as many as a quarter of the early cancers detected by mammography would not progress. That suggests early detection results in a great deal of unnecessary treatment and stress, according to a Harvard School of Public Health analysis of a nationwide screening program in Norway.

"Radiologists have been trained to find even the smallest of tumors in a bid to detect as many cancers as possible to be able to cure breast cancer," lead … Read more

After being available for several years in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe, Swedish firm Sectra's digital mammography system has now been approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. (It was also approved for use in Canada in March and in Russia in April.)

The system, called MicroDose, uses technology called photon counting that results in two key changes over traditional mammograms: higher-resolution images at half the radiation exposure.

"Until now, digital mammography systems in the U.S. have managed to reduce the radiation dose slightly below those of film-based systems," Dr. Jesper … Read more

As National Breast Cancer Awareness month comes to a close, a professor at Manchester University is bringing hope to women (and men) worldwide with his new invention--a portable real-time breast scanner.

Zhipeng Wu has invented a scanner in the shape of a cup to fit over a bra, and uses radio frequency to find differences in tissue instead of measuring density, as mammography does.

The patented scanner still needs to undergo rigorous testing, but looks at this point to be both safe and inexpensive (compared to existing systems), and it can fit in a case the size of a lunch … Read more

It all started more than 25 years ago, when James C. Tilton, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, began investigating a novel way to analyze the pixels that comprise digital images.

He devised an algorithm that took image segmentation (grouping pixels at different levels of detail) to a whole new level; he not only found regional objects, but also grouped spatially separate objects into region classes. In other words, applied to a satellite image, it could not only identify and separate lakes of varying depths, but could recognize lakes as a class of objects spatially distinguishable from, say, trees.

He calls this Recursive Hierarchical Segmentation, and it has been used to analyze Earth-imaging data from NASA's Landsat and Terra spacecraft to improve snow and ice maps, find potential locations for archeological digs, etc. It is now being applied to medical imaging to improve mammograms, ultrasounds, digital x-rays, and more.

"My original concept was geared to Earth science," says Tilton, who was at first skeptical that his algorithm could enhance, say, mammography. "I never thought it would be used for medical imaging."

Then he processed cell images and saw details not visible in unprocessed displays of those images. "The cell features stood out real clearly, and this made me realize that Bartron was onto to something."

Bartron Medical Imaging, based out of Connecticut, has since developed the new MED-SEG system, which the FDA recently cleared for use by trained professionals to process images alongside other images, though stipulated that the system should not (at least yet) be used for primary image diagnosis.

Bartron, which first studied the software through Goddard's Innovative Partnerships Program Office, licensed the patented technology in 2003 to create a system that would differentiate hard-to-see medical image details. It then began to work with doctors to analyze CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, etc.… Read more