Nuclear medicine tackles limits of other screening options

October 2, 2008 Diagnostic Imaging. Nuclear medicine tackles limits of other screening options Studies presented at SNM meeting suggest emerging role for PET and PET/CT in finding extremely small tumors in high-risk women BY KAREN SANDRICK -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's a given that breast cancer screening reduces mortality from the second leading cause of death of women in the U.S. Early detection of breast cancer requires screening techniques that can reliably detect lesions in the 5 to 15-mm range. Screening techniques have difficulty finding abnormalities of this size, however. Conventional scintimammography often has an abysmal sensitivity, said Dr. Michael O'Connor, a radiologist from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. In a 2002 study of 50 women, general-purpose scintimammography had a sensitivity of 35% to 64% for lesions less than 1 cm, O'Connor reported at the 2008 SNM meeting in June (J Nucl Med 2002; 43(7):909-915). Ultrasound adds little. Ultrasound and mammography had a sensitivity of 50% in a study of 2500 women who were at high risk for breast cancer, O'Connor said (JAMA 2008;299[18];2151-2163).

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