Using Mammography for Cancer Control: An Unrealized Potential

Stereotactic core-needle biopsy of the breast: a report of the Joint Task Force of the American College of Radiology, American College of Surgeons, and College of American Pathologists

“…5 Excessive biopsies for benign lesions have adverse effects on society and on the women who undergo them because they increase the costs of screening, cause morbidity and anxiety, and add to the barriers that keep women from using a potentially life-saving procedure. 7 In some institutions, particularly in Europe, fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) has largely replaced excisional biopsy for the evaluation of mammographic abnormalities. 8 In the United States, several problems have blocked the acceptance of FNAC for the evaluation of mammographically detected abnormalities, including the fact that it requires a skilled cytopathologist, the variability in the reported accuracy of the procedure, the high rates of insufficient sampling, and the medicolegal environment.…”

Flawed assumptions used to defend screening mammography

“…National Cancer Institute-funded Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) models estimated background breast cancer mortality trends absent screening mammography and adjuvant therapy from 1975 to 2000. 3 The median of 7 different CISNET models estimated a 31% expected increase in the mortality rate secondary to background incidence trends or an average increase of 1.2% per year. 2.…”

“…The evaluated years were not "prescreening" because during those years the national breast cancer detection demonstration program began, 2 and by the end of the interval, at least 5% to 10% of women in the United States had been screened. 3 By then, the national awareness of breast cancer had been heightened after the wives of both the president and the vice president during 1974-1977 went public with their diagnoses of breast cancer and mastectomies. 4 The benefits of screening were already being widely reported by the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, which had been studying screening since 1963.…”

“…5 The authors describe their 1.3% APC as central to other estimates (ranging from 0.8% to 2.3%) that they list in a table captioned "Temporal Trends Prior to Mammographic Screening," and they specifically justify it as consistent with the "4-decade historic Connecticut Tumor Registry trend of 1.2%" from 1940 to 1982. All 9 of the APCs for women in the table, however, include early years of national screening in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 3,[6][7][8][9] and this is apparent from the >2-fold higher APCs for the screened age groups versus younger unscreened women.…”

Breast tumor detection and classification in Mammograms: Gabor wavelet vs. statistical features

“…The American Cancer Society estimates that around 1,658,370 women in the US will be identified with breast tumor, and due to it about 589,430 females died till 2015 [2]. It is considered that most effective way to raise the chance of save from disease is by diagnosis and treatment in early stages [3][4]. Mammography is the major screening tool which is carried out for detection of breast cancer at early stage and by the use of mammography at least 30% drop in breast cancer losses [5].…”