McLeod Director of Breast Imaging Dr. Shawn Conwell explains why the Whole Breast Ultrasound System is an advancement over the traditional handheld ultrasound for detecting breast cancer in women with dense breasts.

A handheld breast ultrasound has been used for quite a long time in order to try to detect cancers in women with dense breast, according to McLeod Director of Breast Imaging Dr. Shawn Conwell. But the handheld ultrasound is difficult and imperfect.

“It’s lengthy, it’s time consuming. A technologist has to stand there at the bedside obtaining those images, and then when those images are transferred to a radiologist, of course, every piece of the breast is not directly imaged,” he said. “So if we’re comparing from year to year to year, I don’t have previous images of the entirety of the breast to compare, say last year to this year.”

But with automated breast ultrasound scanning the whole breast is imaged in one sweep of the circular probe, making a complete picture easily available to compare year after year. And having a comparison image is critical for seeing areas of concern as they develop or change.

Overall, Dr. Conwell says a woman with dense breasts needs to talk to her doctor about her options for breast cancer screening because adding an ultrasound could make a life-saving difference.

“If a woman has dense breasts, the primary benefit to obtaining an ultrasound in addition to the mammogram is we’re going to find those cancers that the mammogram may miss because of the breast tissue density. And our data suggests that that may be as many as four per thousand that we don’t find by mammogram alone,” he said.

A woman who knows that she has dense breast tissue and wishes to obtain this extra procedure should have a conversation with her referring doctors about this technology and whether or not it would be right for them.

Learn more about McLeod Health’s Breast Cancer treatments and services at McLeodHealth.org.