X-ray trick picks out tiny tumours

19:00 19 February 03

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition

An ingenious advance in mammography may make it possible to detect cancer at a much earlier stage. A research team has discovered that tumour cells give away their presence by scattering X-rays in a unique way, making them much easier to pinpoint among healthy cells.

In Britain, breast cancer affects one woman in 10, and is the biggest cause of cancer deaths among them. And like all cancers, early detection is crucial for reducing the chances of the tumour shedding cells and spawning secondary tumours elsewhere in the body.

But with today's cancer-screening systems, it is very hard to spot growths that are less than 10 millimetres wide, particularly in women younger than 45. That is because healthy breast tissue and tumours look very similar on a conventional mammogram. At that size, doctors are trying to find slightly less grey areas in fields of grey.

But physicist Robert Speller and a team at University College London are developing a new form of mammogram that can detect tumours only four millimetres wide, when they are too small to spawn secondaries and are easier to excise by surgery.

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