Issues in breast cancer screening

This paper will review the use of screening mammography in the United States, with an emphasis on its limitations as currently practiced. It will then emphasize several areas where breast cancer imaging practice can be improved, namely in reducing overtreatment of potentially nonlethal cancers, in monitoring the effectiveness of nonsurgical therapies, and in guiding noninvasive therapies. Any new modality that is to have an impact on breast cancer mortality must perform comparably to screening mammography to become widely utilized. While mammography is not perfect, it has set a high threshold that other modalities must reach before they will be widely utilized for screening or diagnosis.