Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Proponents of computer-aided detection (CAD) technology will likely not be pleased with a study published yesterday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which found that CAD did not improve the accuracy of screening mammography, and that it actually increases a woman's risk of being called back unnecessarily.
Conducted under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute's Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium and led by Dr. Joshua Fenton from the University of California, Davis, the study analyzed 1.6 million mammograms in seven states to determine if CAD helps find breast cancer.
Fenton, as CAD enthusiasts will recall, also led a controversial study on CAD that was published in 2007 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That paper concluded that the use of CAD was associated with reduced accuracy of screening mammography interpretation and no difference in the detection rate of invasive cancer.
Results from this latest effort again paint a disturbing picture: CAD was associated with statistically significant lower specificity and positive predictive values. In addition, sensitivity for invasive breast cancers was similar whether or not CAD was used.
Associate editor Kate Madden Yee has our coverage of the study, which you can find here or by visiting our Women's Imaging Digital Community at women.auntminnie.com. Stay tuned for future coverage on the reaction to this hot-button study.
And that's not the only late-breaking news in a busy week in the Women's Imaging Digital Community. In another research project published yesterday in the JNCI, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital shared their results from an initiative that examined if tumors in women with dense breasts were associated with specific tumor characteristics and types.
It turns out that these tumors were more likely to have certain aggressive characteristics than tumors in women with less dense breasts. For the details, click here.
PET market update
The U.S. PET and PET/CT market hasn't been immune to the effects of the economic downturn, but in good news, annual procedure volume still increased by 7.1% per year from 2008 to 2010, according to a new report from market research firm IMV Medical Information Division.
That's higher than some other imaging modalities that have only been growing at 2% to 3%, said Lorna Young, senior director of market research at IMV. IMV's 2011 study estimates that 1.74 million clinical PET patient studies were performed in 2010 on fixed and mobile PET and PET/CT scanners at 2,085 U.S. hospital and nonhospital sites.
To learn more about the current dynamics of the U.S. PET and PET/CT market, click here or drop by our Molecular Imaging Digital Community at molecular.auntminnie.com.
Disclosure notice: AuntMinnie.com is owned by IMV, Ltd.
