As part of her continuing evaluation of the usefulness of CAD in finding ILC, Dr. Stamatia Destounis and colleagues performed a retrospective review of 93 biopsy-proven ILC patients with prior mammograms from June 2002 to December 2008. Of these 93, CAD successfully marked the lesion in 58 cases (62%) at the time of diagnosis.
CAD also marked the cancer in the mammogram from the year prior to diagnosis in 20 cases (22%), five of which had lymph node metastases.
"So potentially, if the radiologist had acted on the CAD marks, these patients could have been diagnosed a year earlier, possibly prior to the lymph node metastases," she said.
At diagnosis, the mean mammographic lesion size was 1.92 cm; the mean size at surgery was 2.36 cm. On the downside, a significant number of ILCs weren't marked by CAD in either the year of cancer diagnosis or in the prior year.
