In Breast Cancer Finding Click on image for larger jpg Australian scientists using the world's most powerful X-ray sources to probe the atomic realm have discovered that breast cancer can be diagnosed from changes to the structure of a single hair. The results could lead to a better method for screening for breast cancer. This research into breast cancer diagnosis is one of the first pay-offs from Australia's investment in the ASRP and underlines the importance of synchrotron technology.
Synchrotrons are large electron accelerators.
They generate high intensity X-rays that can probe matter at the atomic level with a resolution of less than a millionth of a millimetre. We can work out the structure from the scattering pattern. The breast cancer research rested on images of hair resolved to the molecular level. The images were generated at the Australian National Beamline Facility at the world-class synchrotron known as the Photon Factory in Tsukuba Science City, Japan, and at the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. The team, led by Dr Veronica James of the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, compared the structure of hair from women with breast cancer with that of women without the disease.