Safer detection of breast cancer

Breast cancer: One in ten women is confronted with this diagnosis at a certain point in her life. The chances for healing are good if the cancer is detected at an early stage. Therefore, preventive medical checkups, e.g. palpation of the breasts by the gynaecologist or mammography screening are so important. However, one problem of X-ray mammography is that very often benign mutations are rated as "highly suspicious". In other words: The patients then have to live with the enormously stressful suspicion of suffering from breast cancer - until a further examination, e.g. an ultrasound or a biopsy, shows that this was only a false alarm. For this reason, Dirk Grosenick and Axel Hagen of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), together with doctors of the Charité in Berlin, have developed a new measurement procedure which makes a safer differentiation between benign and malignant tumours possible. Fluorescence mammography could be used as a complementary method for the preventive medical check-up for breast cancer.