With an estimated 494,000 new cases per year, breast cancer is by far the most common cancer among women across Europe.
Particularly affected are women with dense breast tissue because of the difficultly it can cause when trying to detect cancer early using mammography.
GE Healthcare is providing a new supplementary screening exam option: InveniaT Automated Breast Ultrasound System (ABUS), which can be used to increase cancer detection sensitivity in dense breast tissue. Having dense breast tissue represents a significant risk factor because it not only increases the likelihood of developing breast cancer, but can also mask the appearance of the disease on mammography scans
However, a supplementary automated breast ultrasound examination can increase the likelihood of early breast cancer detection. Clinical studies have shown that if the InveniaT ABUS is used in addition to a standard mammography the likelihood of finding invasive breast cancers has a 55% relative increase whencompared to mammography alone.
“ABUS is a non-invasive examination that eliminates operator variation with improved technique standardisation,” said Dr Brigitte Wilczek, who alongside colleagues at St. Göran’sHospital in Stockholm conducted a study of 1675 women to analyse the effectiveness of combining an ABUS examination with a traditional mammography. “
“One patient who participated in the study was a woman in her late 60s with more than 50% breast density. Her mammography screening results returned as normal, but the 3D-ABUS revealed a tumour in the upper-outer quadrant of her left breast. ABUS is a valuable tool in the screening of women with dense breasts and therapy assessment.”
