Nuclear Medicine breast imaging: Current status and future directions

The most of breast masses are not tumorous and mastectomy is not the final breast cancer treatment. Breast cancer could be prevented and treated by early detection. Nuclear medicine methods are able to quantify molecular activity and physiological processes within the body, instead of anatomical/structural information. Therefore, these methods could detect disease in its earliest stages. In this study, the Nuclear Medicine status in breast imaging application and its future direction is investigated.Methods: A computerized search using the databases PubMED and Science Direct, covering the period from 2004 to 2014, was conducted using the following key search terms: Nuclear Medicine , breast cancer and breast imaging . In total, 28 relevant papers were reviewed.Results and Discussion: It was shown that the accuracy of nuclear medicine breast imaging is 40% to 60% for small breast abnormalities and is 90% for abnormalities over one centimeter. For a variety of indications, nuclear medicine approach is more sensitive than standard X-ray methods and other techniques.Conclusion: Nuclear medicine is a useful method to evaluate the suspected patients with indeterminate (difficult to read) mammograms or physical exams. Scintimammography may help detect additional small breast tumors that are not often detectable by other methods.

Keywords:

Nuclear Medicine , Breast imaging , Breast cancer