Breast imaging devices for nuclear medicine

Breast cancer has long been a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Mammography is the first-line imaging examination used to detect breast cancer; it has high sensitivity but only moderate specificity. The currently used secondary imaging modalities, sonography and MRI, cannot weed out all the false-positive lesions that mammography identifies as potentially malignant. Further, many patients do not image well on mammography, so there is a significant need for alternative imaging methods. Recently, technologies using small-field, pixelated detectors optimized for breast imaging have become available for both single-photon-emitting and positron-emitting radiopharmaceuticals. This article addresses the construction and functionality of several detector types and their application to imaging of the breast. Technical aspects of nuclear breast imaging will be discussed briefly. The article concludes with an assessment of the position of nuclear medicine imaging of the breast within the overall diagnostic scheme for breast cancer detection.