by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | June 03, 2010
FUJIFILM Medical is one of the few manufacturers that still offers a film mammography unit.
"We've seen those sales dwindling year over year, but we'll continue to offer a film until demand goes away," says Vandergrift.
The refurbished and service sectors echo these trends. Jim McGinty is the president of Digitec Medical Service Corporation, a Georgia-based sales and service company of mammography systems.
"We are shipping analog units but digital sales outnumber analog by a wide margin," says McGinty.
Dwindling Expertise?
Digital or not, there is one factor that trumps variation in technology across facilities: the breast imaging expert that reads the image.
Carestream Health's CARESTREAM
Mammography Workstation Image courtesy of
Carestream Health
"I think all professionals would say that the most critical part of any mammography procedure is the radiologist who is looking at the results," says Stephen Archer, worldwide marketing director for women's health care for Carestream Health. "It doesn't matter how they get the image, whether it's film or digital or what type of digital, the most important thing is the person looking at that image and interpreting the results."
Many radiologists also agree that sub-specialized breast imaging can make a big difference for their patients.
"We strongly encourage patients to seek out centers where the care is given by specialists," says Dr. Levine. "For example, when the specialists at our center recommend a biopsy, over 50 percent of the time, the result is cancer. Across the country, when biopsies are done, on average only 20 percent of the time it's cancer," he says.
However, finding a breast imaging specialist is getting harder. Today, many young radiologists are reluctant to focus their careers on mammography. Reasons include the high incidence of lawsuits, low pay for the service and stress associated with fear of image misinterpretation.
"We all want to broaden the availability of mammography," says Vandergrift. "However, there seems to be fewer and fewer radiologists getting into mammography."
Vandergrift believes that digital mammography systems can help alleviate the problem, since it is easy to send images to a central location for interpretation. But this, too, poses a challenge.
