George M. Tallis

A review of the technical features of breast cancer screening illustrated by a specific model using South Australian cancer registry data

This paper illustrates many of the concepts and issues relating to breast cancer screening by reference to a case study of screening in South Australia and by a survey of the mathematical screening models. This work is motivated by the observation that, for some women, the prospects for a breast cancer cure appear to be enhanced if the disease is detected early. We use data from the South Australian Cancer Registry to estimate some of the parameters which describe the pattern of this disease in the South Australian female population, and the underlying model is then used to estimate the impact of various screening designs on the efficacy of a variety of breast cancer screening programmes.

A Note on the Sensitivities of Self-reporting and Screen Detection of Primary Breast Tumours

Screening programs for breast cancer are widely used to reduce the impact of breast cancer in populations. For example, the South Australian Breast X–ray Service, BreastScreen SA, established in 1989, is a participant in the National Program of Early Detection of Breast Cancer. BreastScreen SA has collected information on both screening–detected and interval or self–reported cases, which enables the estimation of various important attributes of the screening mechanism. In this paper, a tailored model is fitted to the BreastScreen SA data. The probabilities that the screening detects a tumour of a given size and that an individual reports a tumour by a specified size in the absence of screening are estimated. Estimates of the distribution of sizes detected in the absence of screening, and at the first two screenings, are also given.

Evaluation of the impact of breast cancer screening in South Australia

Background:  In 1989 BreastScreen SA started screening for breast cancer in South Australia.