Breakthroughs in Women's Health: Using 3D Ultrasound for Better Mammograms

Lori Miller used to feel relieved when her mammogram results arrived in the mail. “They’re always normal,” she says. But in recent years, there’s been a puzzling postscript. “The letter explains that I have ‘dense breasts,’ which makes it harder to find cancer on a regular mammogram,” she says. That made her “normal” results feel less than fully reassuring.

This year, Miller, 58, a retired industrial engineer from Pontiac, Michigan, tried something new. First, she had a conventional mammogram. Then she walked down the hall at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit for a three-dimensional whole-breast ultrasound screening called SoftVue, recently granted premarket approval by the Food and Drug Administration as an add-on cancer check for dense breasts.

Using sound waves to create images

Called a 3D whole-breast ultrasound tomography system, the new technology sends sound waves to create a 360-degree image of the breast that offers a more comprehensive look at the tissue — without compression or radiation — showing tissue changes in detail. The results? Normal. “It was nice knowing the results would provide increased cancer detection,” Miller says.

Cancer risk is up to four times higher in dense breasts, possibly because dense tissue has more cells that can become abnormal, and women with dense breasts may have higher levels of estrogen, which can increase the risk of cancer. Conventional mammograms may miss up to 40 to 60 percent of cancers in dense breasts, says Rachel Brem, M.D., director of breast imaging and intervention at George Washington University in Washington.