There’s some brand new technology out, beneficial to women. It’s a new screening tool, designed to detect breast cancer. The clincher is that it can work three times better than the typical mammogram, thereby finding tumors faster and earlier. Furthermore, it can find tumors in women who have very dense breast tissue, which mammography has had problems with for years.A mammogram is essentially an X-ray of a woman’s breasts. In comparison with the new technology, the old standard was found to find less than one third of the tumors discovered by the new technique.
The technique is called molecular breast imaging – MBI for short. It promises to make the process of finding breast cancer tumors faster, easier, and less invasive. For instance, patience will no longer need to be injected with the radioactive agents, which are absorbed by the tissue and used to make the tumors themselves show up in the X-ray. Instead, MBI uses cameras. It has a very low risk of radiation, but the makers are working to make even that small risk a non issue.
