20 Mar 2023 • Researchers discovered that digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) greatly outperformed digital mammography in terms of cancer detection rate and recall rate in a study comprising more than 2.5 million screening mammograms for more than one million women (DM). Researchers examined 2,528,063 screening mammograms for 1,100,447 women (mean age of 57) for the retrospective multicenter study, that was recently published in "Radiology". The study found that 502,500 women underwent a total of 834,336 DM screening exams and 597,947 women underwent a total of 1,693,727 DBT screening exams. The authors of the study discovered that DBT had a better positive predictive value and a higher cancer detection rate (5.3/1000 vs. 4.5/1000 for DM) (5.9 percent vs. 4.3 percent). Researchers also discovered that DBT had a reduced recall rate (8.9 percent vs. 10.3 percent for DM). The study's principal author, Emily Conant, M.D., observed that while the results were comparable to those noted in prior DBT studies, seeing the results in a sizable, varied multicenter cohort reinforced the benefits of DBT over two-dimensional (2D) mammography. "2D mammography, as we know, is very limited in (women with dense breasts) because the breast just appears white. That dense breast tissue obscures finding things,” noted Dr. Conant. She continued by saying that DBT offers women with dense breasts improved visualisation for cancer diagnosis.

Source: Diagnostic Imaging | Read full story