A high resolution camera detects tumours which may not appear on standard mammography.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have been comparing mammography with a technique called scintimammography, which involved the injection of a radioactive tracer chemical. Till now, scintimammography, which is good at distinguishing between malignant and benign tumours, has been done on a standard gamma camera. The limitation of this kind of camera is that it cannot pick up small tumours within dense breast tissue.

The Johns Hopkins team has designed a new, breast specific, camera that overcomes these limitations. In a study of 50 women, with a total of 58 tumours, the new system proved to be able to detect more malignancies than the standard gamma camera. It was also more sensitive in the detection of small tumours, of less than one centimetre in diameter. Mammography is very useful, they say, but maybe scintimammography, with the new camera, might complement it by locating cancers that would not otherwise be detected.

Source

Journal of Nuclear Medicine July 2002