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New Method to Better Detect Breast Cancer
– Reported, June 06, 2013
(Ivanhoe Newswire) X-ray mammography is currently the only accepted routine screening method for early detection of breast cancer, but it cannot accurately distinguish whether microcalcifications (microscopic areas of calcium accumulation) are associated with benign or malignant breast lesions, but now there is a newly developed, single-step Raman spectroscopy algorithm that has the potential to simultaneously detect microcalcifications and enable diagnosis, as well as save money, by reducing repeat biopsies.
Researchers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, used a portable clinical Raman spectroscopy system to obtain Raman spectra from breast tissue biopsy specimens of 33 women. According to the researchers the newly developed algorithm exhibited positive and negative predictive values of 100 percent and 96 percent, respectively, for the diagnosis of breast cancer with or without microcalcifications. The algorithm also showed an overall accuracy of 82 percent for classification of the samples into normal, benign or malignant lesions.
SOURCE: Cancer Research, June 2013
