If found, these areas are marked for further scrutiny by a radiologist. A retrospective clinical study of this technology, published in Radiology, indicated that it can help doctors find one additional cancer in 10 without calling for any additional unnecessary biopsies. Breast cancer will afflict one in nine American women. With early detection, many of those cancers can be cured. Recently, however, concern has arisen over the accuracy of mammography and of radiologists' ability to accurately read the films, especially when they may read 100-200 films a day.
Spiculated lesions are star-shaped distortions in breast tissue that almost always indicate cancer.
Thus biopsies are usually performed when stellate lesions are found. However, they are difficult to detect because of their subtle and varied appearance. Sandia's software employees a new feature for recognizing such lesions and a different statistical method for analyzing image information. Using these features, the computer is able to make fine discriminations and detections based on subtle changes in the visual texture of the image. ALOE was inspired by Kegelmeyer's research on how doctors spot cancers and by actually sitting with radiologists and observing what they look for in mammograms.