title: Issues in breast cancer screening.
abstract: This paper will review the use of screening mammography in the United States, with an emphasis on its limitations as currently practiced. It will then emphasize several areas where breast cancer imaging practice can be improved, namely in reducing overtreatment of potentially nonlethal cancers, in monitoring the effectiveness of nonsurgical therapies, and in guiding noninvasive therapies. Any new modality that is to have an impact on breast cancer mortality must perform comparably to screening mammography to become widely utilized. While mammography is not perfect, it has set a high threshold that other modalities must reach before they will be widely utilized for screening or diagnosis.
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina, School of Medicine, 7510 Room 503, Old Infirmary Building, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA. etta_pisano@med.unc.edu
authors.forename: Etta
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pisano
mesh_terms: D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy; D006801:Humans; D008327:Mammography / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016896:Treatment Outcome