More than 175,000 American women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and approximately 50,000 of these women will die of their disease. The best chance for a cure of this disease is early detection of breast cancer tumors. X-ray mammography has so far been shown to be an important component of any breast cancer screening program., play a critical role in the detection, diagnosis and local staging of breast cancer tumors. X-ray mammography has so far been shown to be an important component of any breast cancer screening program., playing a critical role in the detection, diagnosis and local staging of breast cancer. Over the past 15 years there has been an explosion of medical imaging technology, resulting in a variety of possible imaging resources for research and clinical uses. In the last several years, there have been intense efforts to apply various imaging modalities to improve the detection, diagnosis and local staging of breast cancer. The major goal of this project is to develop an understanding of the relative performance of the of the new generation of breast imaging modalities. The results obtained from this program will be used to guide appropriate clinical implementation of advanced breast imaging technology and will provide the critical data necessary to plan proper phase 3 trials to establish clear clinical roles of this technology. In order to accomplish this goal, 3 interrelated clinical trials will be performed, each targeted at a particular clinical implementation of breast imaging: lesion characterization, local cancer staging, and screening. Each of these trials will employ state-of-the-art technology in FFDM, MRI, PET, ultrasound, and optical imaging. They will each employ a clinically- relevant patient population. In addition to these 3 clinical projects evaluating the performance of the different modalities to perform the different clinical implementations, a fourth project will model the cost and outcome of these models. These will then be utilized to develop cost-effective strategies for clinical applications of multi-modality breast imaging.
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