"Guns, Tumors And The Limits Of The Human Eye" (NPR)

Radiologist Julianne Greenberg sees hundreds of mammogram images a day. Her job is to spot the rare and sometimes tiny cancers in the breast tissue. On the left is a healthy breast, and on the right is one with a tiny tumor. (SOURCE: NPR)

NPR's Alix Spiegel writes a wonderful piece about the life of a radiologist, a mammographer, Dr. Julianne Greenberg. "Julianne Greenberg spends much of her professional life in a dark room only slightly larger than a closet." How true indeed! Ah, the life of a diagnostic radiologist.

A bit like air-traffic controller in medicine - the article discusses how Dr. Greenberg can sit in the dark room, in the blackness for up to hours at a time with the only light source in the room--the images filled with images of women's breasts. Dr. Greenberg is a mammographer--on the frontlines of the fight against breast cancer. Daily, a mammographer can see hundreds of images and patients. As much of a science as art, her eyes are trained almost to a subconscious level to automatically detect breast cancers from a background of noise, shadows, and mimics of cancer. She must find what is nearly "invisible."

To read more of this NPR piece on what a radiologist does and especially what a mammographer does, please visit this link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122561355&...