Automated 3-D Breast Ultrasound as a Promising Adjunctive Screening Tool for Examining Dense Breast Tissue

Because there is a parallel be-tween the advanced breast cancer rate and the breast cancerdeath rate in a given population, the immediate goal ofscreening is to reduce the advanced breast cancer rate byfinding as many invasive tumors in their preclinical, de-tectable phase as early as possible. It has been shown thatin a successful screening program at least 50% of all inva-sive cancers and at least 30% of the poorly differentiatedinvasive tumors need to be smaller than 15 mm in diam-eter, among the combined screen-detected and intervalcancers, to decrease the advanced breast cancer rate andthereby accomplish a significant decrease in mortalityfrom breast cancer.