The Addition Of Breast Tomosynthesis To Standard Digital Mammography Increases Diagno

[News]

The addition of three-dimensional breast imaging - a technology called tomosynthesis - to standard digital mammography significantly increases radiologists' diagnostic accuracy while reducing false positive recall rates, according to the results of a multi-center study published in Radiology...

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[gdpawel]

This is interesting! It seems to follow the observations of at least two other diagnostic techniques in cancer medicine.

Currently, there is no adequate diagnostic test for ovarian cancer. However, by using the combination of HE4 and CA125 tumor markers, physicians can better triage patients for care and refer them to the appropriate specialist whether at a community hospital or large academic institution.

It was only last year that results of a pilot study were published in the journal of Gynecologic Oncology that showed the combination of HE4 and CA125 provided the highest level of sensitivity and specificity out of all marker combinations for predicting the presence of ovarian cancer.

The combination performed well in both pre- and post-menopausal women, accurately stratifying 95% of patients with epithelial cancer as high risk and 75% of benign cases as low risk.

While some cell-death assay labs use singular endpoints (point of termination), functional cytometric profiling labs assess the activity of a drug upon combined effect of all cellular processes, using several metabolic (cell metabolism) and morphologic (structure) endpoints, at the cell "population" level rather than at the "single cell" level, measuring the interaction of the entire genome.

Just as using a combination of CA125 and HE4 makes identification more accurate, a combination of metabolic and morphologic endpoints makes functional cytometric profiling more accurate.

I like the idea that combining breast tomosynthesis to standard digital mammography, false positive recall rates are significantly decreased.