Brian W. Giambattista

Digital Breast Tomosynthesis: Potentially a New Method for Breast Cancer Screening

Despite recent advances in mammography imaging, it has been shown that many cancers are missed by mammography [1–4]. One of the main reasons cancers are missed is that they are masked by radiographically dense fibroglandular breast tissue which may be overlying or encompassing the cancer [5–11]. Standard mammography techniques, either analog (film) or digital, suffer from the limitation that despite breast compression, three-dimensional anatomical information is projected onto a two-dimensional detector. Tomosynthesis is a technique that allows the radiologist to view individual planes of the breast, potentially reducing the problem of superimposed structures which may limit conventional mammography techniques.