Scintimammography developer Dilon Technologies of Newport News, VA, is touting results of a study that concludes that breast-specific gamma imaging (BSGI) is substantially less expensive than MRI.
BSGI is a molecular breast imaging technique designed to detect breast carcinoma when used in presurgical planning for patients with known cancer diagnoses.
Lead study author Dr. Margaret Bertrand, director of breast imaging at Solis Bertrand Breast Center in Greensboro, NC, said that BSGI proved to be a cost-effective breast diagnostic imaging modality, able to detect mammographically occult breast cancers and provide comparable sensitivity to MRI at a higher patient compliance rate and lower cost. She presented results of the study, which used a Dilon 6800 BSGI camera, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco last week.
In the study, BSGI was performed prior to needle biopsy on 123 patients with 126 breast carcinomas who subsequently had a postbiopsy, preoperative breast MRI for surgical planning. BSGI and MRI both detected 123 of the 126 malignancies, yielding a sensitivity of 97% for both modalities.
The study results indicate that 11% of the cancers found with BSGI were detected in patients with equivocal or negative mammograms. Four patients with cancer were excluded from the study because they were unable to undergo breast MRI. The cost for conducting BSGI in this group of patients was $37,321.87, compared with $122,314.89 to conduct breast MRI on the same group.
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