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 and educating those attending on our new Mi~Scan device. It’s been fantastic to see so many positive reactions and people understanding why we’ve chosen to go down this route with our 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 agrees that our move away from imaging to tissue analysis makes sense. Ultimately there is currently no way of knowing a woman’s breast tissue properties before undergoing imaging. Most women will start with a Mammogram, but with around half of women having a high percentage of fiber-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 the first time, to maximise the chance of finding her cancer whilst reducing the number of unnecessary and uncomfortable Mammograms. This facilitates a new workflow. For example, looking at the UK symptomatic pathway, women who find something suspicious are typically referred to a one-stop breast clinic, starting with a basic assessment. If they are under 40, they will not be offered a mammogram. 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 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 from seeing cancer in their imaging. Deciding who should and should not have a standard Mammogram is purely based on statistics. The Mi~Scan product allows different thinking. A quick, safe and pain-free measurement with the Mi~Scan device means the most appropriate technique can be selected upfront, allowing for personalised pathways.
The good news is that there are many alternative techniques available for imaging dense breasts, including contrast-enhanced mammography. Knowing that a patient needs these upfront can release the resources that were applied to those unnecessary standard mammograms to provide alternative techniques and ultimately detect more instances of breast cancer, earlier.