New 3D Visualization Tool For Early Diagnosis Of Breast Cancer

According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the highest cancer affecting women in industrialized countries. The sooner the cancer is found, the more likely there will be a successful treatment to the disease. However, finding the cancer in some cases is not always easy, due to the fact that some breasts, especially those in young women, are very dense. Because of this, X-ray Mammography, despite being the most widely used tool to diagnose the disease, fails to identify around 10 to 20 percent of breast cancers. X-ray Computed Tomography (CT scan) can produce 3-D images of the entire breast, providing a more detailed image and thus improving the detection, but its use is limited because of the radiation dose use in radiosensitive organs, such as the breast.

To solve the problem of not being able to identify all breast cancers because of lack of image detail, the the Helsinki University Central Hospital, Turku University Central Hospital (Finland), the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (Finland), the University Hospital of Grenoble (France), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg (Germany) and the Biomedical experimental station (beamline) at the ESRF developed a new method of imaging breast cancer. The technique, called Analyzer-Based X-ray Imaging (ABI), is able to visualize breast tissue using a much lower radiation dose while providing a much more detailed image. The example on top of this post exhibits a breast from a normal CT scan (left) as compared to the same breast from the ABI-CT (right). The red arrow points to the location of the tumor.

The ABI-CT provides an high resolution image that could otherwise only be seen by the microscopic study of a sample of the breast tissue. The teams are very optimistic about the ABI technique being applied in future clinics. “We can clearly distinguish more microcalcifications -small deposits of minerals which can indicate the presence of a cancer- than with radiography methods and improve the definition of their shapes and margins”, explains Jani Keyriläinen, main author of the report describing this method. “If we compare the images with X-ray mammograms and conventional CT images, we can confirm that this technique performs extremely well."

Source:

European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) (2008, September 17). New 3D Visualization Tool For Early Diagnosis Of Breast Cancer. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/09/080917145738.htm