Screen-Film Mammography had a great impact in breast cancer detection,
thanks to its possibility of early diagnosis,
that leads to mortality reduction [1].
Moreover mammography represents the only imaging tool,
which permits to reduce mortality [2].
Digital Mammography (DM) represents an evolution of Screen-Film Mammography,
that demonstrates to have similar overall diagnostic accuracy of film mammography,
but digital mammography is more accurate in women under the age of 50 years,
women with radiographically dense breasts,
and premenopausal or perimenopausal women [3] .
However,
the overlap of fibro-glandular tissue in dense breasts may affect sensitivity and specificity of DM by masking,
creating a False Negative (FN) case,
or mimicking a cancer,
creating a False Positive (FP) one [4].
Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) is a new imaging technique aimed to overcome tissue overlap.
It is based on a moving x-ray source and a digital detector used to obtain a quasi-three-dimensional (quasi-3D) volume of thin section data.
Images are then reconstructed with proper algorithms to obtain a set of thin image sections parallel to the breast platform [5].
This technique is expected to improve lesions detectability,
characterization of masses and architectural distortions,
especially in dense breasts [6-7].
DBT has the potential of being superior to DM,
in particular with two-views,
and for readers with least experience [8].
DBT can also reduce the recall rate [9] thanks to its ability of reducing FP [10-11].
But DBT is still under investigation.
Regarding surgical specimen,
thank to the widespread of Breast Conservative Surgery (BCS),
various strategies have been developed through the years in order to obtain adequate surgical margins,
reducing the need of a second operation after BCS [12].
DM represents a tool used to correctly evaluate surgical margins.
In literature there are different results about the use of specimen-mammography for margins evaluation; some authors suggest that there is a correlation between specimen mammography and histological results [13] and others demonstrate that specimen-mammography does not provide a satisfactory evaluation of the histological margins [14].
The purpose of our study was to compare DBT and DM in breast cancer detection in breast surgical specimens.
For this reason we compared the Diagnostic Yield (DY) of both images techniques.
As the second endpoint we evaluated the subjective impression of the readers in the detectability of lesions.
Moreover we analysed if lesions margins were fully visible or not.