Enter Your Email Address to Receive a
Copy of MedicExhange Member Demograhpics

Doctors have known since the 1970s that women who have dense breasts are at greater risk for developing breast cancer, using medical imaging techniques for measuring density.
Dense breasts have a greater proportion of glandular tissue, which can obscure tumors, making them difficult to detect.

Although there is currently no agreed-upon ‘gold standard’ for measuring breast density, two new studies have tested three different methods for measuring breast density -- the relative proportion of tissue to fat in a woman's breasts. The studies were conducted by a group of medical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

The first study compared two existing techniques for measuring density -- cone-beam CT and breast MRI. It found that both techniques gave similar estimates of the density of 20 pairs of breasts scanned post-mortem. The second study showed the promise of a third technique called dual-energy mammography.

"A better measure of breast density should yield a more accurate assessment of risk for developing breast cancer," medical physicist Justin Ducote, who presented the work on dual-energy mammography, was quoted as saying.

In Ducote's study, the research applied dual energy mammography to 20 pairs of post-mortem breasts. The technique makes use of dual energy x-ray imaging, where overlapping tissue signals can be isolated and quantified by exploiting the change in x-ray attenuation at different energies. According to Ducote, this allowed breast density to be measured from digital mammograms.

Ducote's colleague Huy Le presented related research on the ability of cone-beam CT and breast MRI to measure breast density in the same 20 pairs of postmortem breasts. They found that breast density measurements using these two techniques were highly correlated.

"If we can get agreement of breast density measured on multiple imaging modalities, our confidence in the accuracy of the value we obtain will increase," Le was quoted as saying.

The next step, the researchers say, is to quantify the exact density of the breasts in the study through chemical composition analysis -- a destructive technique, which is why the research was done using post-mortem tissue.

Source: AAPM