ROLE OF CONTRAST ENHANCED DIGITAL MAMMOGRAPHY IN BREAST LESIONS

Back ground: Breast cancer in women is major public health problem throughout the world, Mammography is basic breast imaging modality for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer, mammography has its own limitations so contrast enhanced digital mammography is new advanced application using intravenous injection of contrast under development of subtraction and dual energy technique to improve detection of breast cancer. Aim of the Work: To investigate the potential of using intravenous contrast material with full field digital mammography to facilitate the detection and characterization of lesions in the breast. Patients and Methods: This study was conducted on 40 patients with mammographic clinical findings that warranted biopsy recruited from department of Radio-Diagnosis, Ain Shams University hospitals. A technique for demonstrating breast cancers, dualenergy contrast agent–enhanced digital subtraction mammography, was performed
for the 40female patients. The technique consists of high energy and low-energy digital mammography after administration of iodinated contrast agent. Weighted subtraction of the logarithmic transform of these images is then performed to obtain an image that preferentially shows iodine. Results: Of the40 subjects, twenty eight of these tumors enhanced strongly, proved carcinoma, in the other 12 patients, benign tissue enhanced diffusely in two and weakly ocally in two. These results indicate that the technique is feasible and worthy of further study. Conclusion: Contrast-enhanced digital mammography is a new breast imaging technique using full-field digital mammography in conjunction with the injection of an iodinated contrast medium. Dualenergy CEDM also allows shorter acquisition duration and does not
require prolonged breast compression. This could result in better acceptance from patients and fewer technical problems, such as misregistration of subtracted images.