Breast-Specific Gamma Imaging (BSGI) Changes Patient Care ...( Community Breast Center in Portland...),Health

Community Breast Center in Portland Finds BSGI Capable of Significantly

Changing Clinical Management in Patients

NEWPORT NEWS, Va., Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Using Breast-Specific Gamma Imaging (BSGI) has significantly changed patient management at one breast center in Portland, Oregon. A group of radiologists and surgeons from Legacy Health System recently reported that although still fairly new to BSGI, the procedure has brought about considerable change in their practice.

Earlier this month the institution's surgical team presented data at the North Pacific Surgical Conference on their center's initial experience employing BSGI and the influence it has had on patient care. The study reviewed 176 patient cases referred to BSGI due to one of the following indications: suspicious clinical or mammographic findings, mammographically dense breast tissue or a new diagnosis of breast cancer requiring additional work-up. Of the 47 patients with a recent breast cancer diagnosis, BSGI detected additional disease in three patients, two with cancer in the opposite breast and one with an additional site in the same breast. BSGI also detected cancer in 4 of the 14 patients with a mammographic BIRADS 2 rating, typically indicative of benign findings such as cysts or fibroadenomas. BSGI changed patient management in 14.7 percent of cases with another 6.8 percent where BSGI could have helped to prevent an unneeded biopsy.

According to the authors, BSGI is playing an important role in their breast patient management and has the potential to help prevent unnecessary breast biopsies and interval imaging studies for some BIRADS 3 and 4 cases. They have found it to be a useful adjunct imaging tool, especially for further evaluation of breast tissue in newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. One of the biggest benefits, they state, is that the false positive rate for BSGI was only 6.2 percent which is far less than studies that utilize MRI for t
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