Ultrasound Tomography (UST): a potential new breast screening modality?

摘要

As of 2016, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer amongst women in the UK and globally, it is the second most common cause of cancer-related death1. The current breast cancer screening programme of mammography involves compression of the breast to produce X-ray projection images from two orthogonal planes, which can reveal suspicious lesions~(2,3). However, in women with dense breasts, the shadow of a breast tumour can easily be hidden within the complicated background structure of the glandular tissues and hence its sensitivity in these women decreases significantly~4. This is particularly noteworthy, as women with dense breasts are at higher risk of breast cancer4 and because there is no clinical biomarker of breast density until a mammogram has been done, there is no way to predict whether a woman has dense breasts or not.