ECR 2024
I’m just wrapping up a great few days in Vienna. I’ve been attending the European Congress of Radiology where Radiologists come to attend lectures, maintaining their continuous development alongside equipment vendors who all exhibit their latest and greatest. I’ve been walking around the show handing out postcards, educating those attending on our new Mi~Scan device. It’s been fantastic to see so many positive reactions and people really getting why we’ve chosen to go down this route, with our wholly novel technology.
It’s been a great few days catching up with old friends and making new ones. The most exciting thing has been the ability for me to finally talk about our new device! The even better news is that everyone gets it and agrees that our move away from imaging and in to tissue analysis makes sense. Ultimately there is currently no way of knowing a woman’s breast tissue properties, before she has some form of imaging. Most women will start with a Mammogram but with around half of women having a high percentage of fibre-glandular tissue (dense breasts) the ability to see cancer (in a standard Mammogram) is significantly reduced.
Knowing a woman’s breast tissue properties upfront allows the most suitable imaging technique to be selected first time, to maximise the chance of finding her cancer whilst reducing the number of unnecessary and often painful (for some women) Mammograms. This ultimately facilitates a change of workflow. Looking at the UK symptomatic pathway (for instance) women who find something suspicious are typically referred to a one stop breast clinic. Here they will start with a basic assessment and then the imaging pathway question is if they are over or under 40. Why? Because the amount of fibro-glandular tissue in a woman’s breast, reduces with age. So it’s generally accepted that there is too a high a percentage of dense breasts in women under 40, to perform a standard 2D Mammogram. These women will therefore jump straight to ultrasound, or another dense breast technique. However, there are women under 40 who have breast tissue properties best suited to a Mammogram and there are also still around 50% of women over 40, who do not! These women who have a Mammogram could suffer masking effects from their dense tissue, preventing a Radiologist seeing a cancer in their imaging. The fact is that today using statistics is the only way of deciding who should and who should not have a standard Mammogram. The Mi~Scan product allows different thinking. A very quick, safe and pain free measurement with the Mi~Scan device means the most appropriate technique can be selected upfront, knowing the tissue types and without the need for statistics.
The good news is that there are lots of alternative techniques available for imaging dense breasts, including still using Mammography but slightly different protocols that have been designed to improve detection rates in dense fibro-glandular tissue. Knowing that a patient needs these upfront can release the resources that were applied to all of those unnecessary standard mammograms to provide the alternative techniques and ultimately detect more instances of breast cancer, earlier.