SonoCine
/ Courtesy NBC News
Breast cancer can sometimes be difficult to spot, especially in women with dense breast tissue, which is about 40 percent of the population; but, a new piece of technology may change that.
"Women with dense breast tissue, the mammograms don't work as well. Women with dense breast tissue have a lot of glandular breast tissue in the breast, and as a result, the small cancers can be camouflaged," says Dr. Charles Lackey with St. Mary's Breast Center.
That's where SonoCine technology comes in.
"What this technology does, is it allows us to see through that dense breast tissue and detect up to 40 percent of breast cancers than a mammogram alone," said Dr. Lackey.
Dr. Lackey says in the past mammograms would miss about 50 to 60 percent of cancers in women with dense breasts.
In those cases, an ultrasound would be used as a back-up, and only with still images.
SonoCine records the entire examination, and Dr. Lackey says that's the true benefit.
''We're actually able to capture the entire event and review it later. And by doing so, we're able to focus, concentrate on the entire examination, pick up abnormalities that might be very subtle and missed during a real time examination," he explains.
According to the American Cancer Society, there were about 230,480 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women and 39,520 deaths caused by breast cancer.
American Cancer Society defines breast cancer a malignant tumor that starts in the cells of the breast and can invade surrounding tissues or spread to distant areas of the body.
(Information from NBC News was used in this report.)
