This poster is published under an
open license. Please read the
disclaimer for further details.
Keywords:
Breast, Experimental, Mammography, Ultrasound, Technology assessment, Cancer
Authors:
N. Ridley1, M. Shere2, I. Lyburn3, P. Bannister2; 1Swindon/UK, 2Bristol/UK, 3Cheltenham/UK
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2017/C-1150
Aims and objectives
To determine the effectiveness,
in a post-market clinical study,
of MARIA (Micrima Ltd,
Bristol UK) – a non-ionising,
non-compressing whole-breast scanning system utilising radiowaves – in symptomatic breast care clinics.
Specifically,
this work considers patients whose breast density has been graded ‘c’ or ‘d’ on the BIRADS scale and for whom a diagnosis of cancer had been determined,
as verified by biopsy and subsequent histologic analysis.
Unlike x-ray mammography,
radio-wave imaging does not suffer from impaired detection ability in dense breast tissue (1).
Dielectric property which determines propagation and absorption of radio waves similarly varies in different tissues of the breast and has been considered for imaging since 1991 (2),
but it was the development of an ultra-wideband radar technique at sufficiently high frequency to permit visualisation of relatively small regions that made development of a practical dielectric imaging system possible (3,
4).
In the breast the fatty content is of low dielectric constant,
whereas protein and water exhibit much higher values.
This is the situation in fluid filled cysts and in tumour areas where the cell content is high. Glandular tissue also has elevated dielectric values but except in the lactating breast these are still lower than that of most lesions (5-8).