Breast Cancer: Fighting Disease in 3-D
Reported May 21, 2010
ATLANTA (Ivanhoe Newswire) — One in eight women will develop breast cancer at some point in her lifetime, but more than a quarter of them have dense breast tissue, which means standard mammograms don’t always find the tumor. A new experimental 3-D scanner is showing promise for identifying cancers that other diagnostic tools like mammograms can’t.
For Aloma Sibley, books offer a unique window to places and people she’s never known.
A few months ago, a unique scanner gave her a high resolution view of something far more important — the breast cancer in her own body.
“I could see the tumor, and that was very helpful to me in accepting the diagnosis, to see the tumor for real,” Sibley told Ivanhoe.
The images came from a new prototype cone beam CT scanner. X-ray beams and a digital detector rotate around the breast, taking 300 pictures in ten seconds.
“Once it has all that information, it can reconstruct the breast in any angle or any way that you want without losing any properties of resolution,” Carl D’orsi, M.D., director of Breast Imaging Research at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, Ga., told Ivanhoe.
Researchers say 3-D images from the scan may pick up tumors about 5 millimeters across — the size of a pea.
Now, just one month after a successful lumpectomy, Sibley is on her way to a full recovery grateful for technology that gave her a window to a brighter future.
The breast CT prototype at Emory is one of five in the United States. In the next clinical trial, researchers will study the effectiveness of the new CT scanner in detecting how tumors are responding to chemotherapy.
