Digital mammo tops film for DCIS diagnosis

In a study involving over 1,100 women diagnosed with breast cancer, researchers found that 48.7 percent of women alive or dead from other causes at a median follow-up of 11.7 years had moderately dense breasts. They also found that 46 percent of women who died from breast cancer at a median-follow-up of 5.3 years had moderately dense breasts.

In this podcast, Stephen Rose, MD, president and CEO of Houston Breast Imaging and a principal investigator of the 3-D tomosynthesis clinical trials in 2010, discusses the benefits of the new technology and what his practice learned when implementing the screening program.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has drawn praise for lowering the age threshold for initial mammography screening from 50 to 40 years of age in updated draft recommendations for breast cancer screening, but critics warn that biennial screening is not sufficient for higher-risk populations.

In this podcast, Tom Gentile, president and CEO at GE Healthcare Systems, explains that “the whole focus of imaging is moving beyond the quality of the image.” Patient care, physician productivity and reimbursement take on a renewed focus in light of healthcare reform efforts internationally, he says.

Regardless of experience level, radiologists are likely to be affected by automation bias when utilizing adjunctive artificial intelligence (AI) for mammography interpretation, according to newly published research.

Emerging research looking at data from over 414,000 cases of breast cancer deaths suggests that Black women should begin annual mammography screening seven to nine years earlier than White women.