Clinical

Patients

Compared with conventional X-ray mammography, SoftScan offers five clear benefits:

• There is no need to cause pain by compressing breasts during a scan.
• SoftScan can image dense breast tissue, which is often observed in younger women. According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, women with dense breast tissue are far more likely to develop breast cancer. Mammography has a limited ability to penetrate dense breast tissue.
• SoftScan’s high specificity allows health professionals to locate and characterize tumours as benign or malignant. The device could, therefore, reduce the number of painful and often unnecessary biopsies currently performed following suspicious mammograms. These biopsies cost the American health care system U.S.$1 billion a year and are an important source of expenditure in the Canadian and European health care systems, too.
• SoftScan emits no ionizing radiation, so any number of scans can be done without risk. This compares favourably with mammography, the use of which must be strictly limited. As a treatment-monitoring tool, therefore, SoftScan can allow oncologists to see immediately if a course of action is working and then adjust or interrupt treatment. This could lead to shorter treatments, less suffering, better results and lower costs for the health care system.
• SoftScan could prove useful in pharmaceutical settings in the clinical validation phases of developing new drugs or biomarkers.