New Advances Are Changing Breast Cancer Screening

Transcript:

Jamie Forward: Have there been any recent advances in breast cancer imaging that you’d like to share, Dr. Levin?

Dr. Wendy Levin: Yeah. This is a really exciting question, and I think there have been some great advances in breast cancer screening.

So, there’s the standard breast cancer screening with mammography that’s widely available today, but we’ve made a lot of advances beyond that, that I think are very important. So, a couple of those include 3D mammography, and this is the premier standard of care advancement that we have today. So, this is a 2D mammography. So, it’s able to look through the breast tissue from the top to the bottom, and that actually can cause – and we know this is important because tumors sometimes get hidden behind overlapping tissue. And so, we’re not able to identify really these small masses.

So, if we use 3D mammography, it takes multiple slices through the breast, and that allows radiologists to actually look through the tissue layers directly. And this, we know by multiple clinical studies and a lot of published data that this increases cancer detection rates and drastically cuts down on what we call false alarms, which is also another problem in regular standard mammography where we identify something, and then a woman has to go through a series of biopsies.

And oftentimes, that result is negative. So, it really hones us down and guides us where we should actually move forward with the next step and biopsy a patient. A couple other points here is that we now have contrast enhanced mammography. This is also new, and this modality uses intravenous contrast dyes. So, it’s similar to a CT dye. Alongside a standard mammogram. And this allows us to identify these hyper vascular structures. So, we know that tumors actually feed on the blood supply. And it provides this increased sensitivity comparable to an MRI, but it’s a lower cost, and it’s a faster speed, and probably more applicable out in the community. And then, the third point is actually very exciting for those of us that have been in this field for some time and waiting for this to happen. Is that the 2026 NCCN guidelines actually incorporate AI or artificial intelligence integration into these image-based risk scoring.

And so, there’s actually the opportunity now for radiologists to use AI models directly on standard mammograms to analyze subtle tissue patterns. And there are now algorithms where we can predict a woman’s future five-year breast cancer risk. So, some great advances in the field over the last couple of years.