Current state and future of diagnostic breast imaging

Excerpt

Circumstances concerning the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer have changed considerably over the last few years. Progress in diagnostic techniques has been surprising, and various modalities have been put to effective use in actual clinical settings. In addition, treatment has gone from a time when only surgical management was performed to one in which multiple therapies like pre- and postoperative chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and therapy with molecular targeted agents are performed; techniques like sentinel node biopsy have also become firmly established. In line with such changes in treatment, what is demanded of diagnosis has also changed from simply determining whether or not a tumor is breast cancer to varied tasks such as diagnosis of cancer spread and determing or predicting the effects of neoadjuvant therapy. …