Women under 50 have relatively dense breasts, and it may be very difficult to detect a lesion. The radiologist may want to get additional information by looking at more views in various positions or with different levels of compression. The radiologist may also want to have an ultrasound to unravel a large, soft tissue clump on one side. You may get called back to have additional tests. The vast majority of cases that need additional screening turn out to be nothing serious, so if you get called back, you should not be overly apprehensive.
Calcifications are an entire subject by themselves.
These tiny dots of various shapes, brightly outlined on a field of gray, can be benign in places like the lymph nodes, small arteries, and along the ducts. This is good news because it means that radiologists have another way to pick up cancer. In addition to looking for the mass itself, they can look for these characteristic calcifications. Nonetheless, sometimes it is difficult to tell whether a given calcification is benign or malignant. The calcifications can appear as irregularities in the cloud formation or as tiny, punctation dots.