Society of Nuclear Medicine Releases New Guidelines for Breast-Specific Gamma Imaging

NEWPORT NEWS, Va., June 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Dilon Diagnostics, the industry leader in molecular breast imaging, today announced that the Society of Nuclear Medicine Procedure Guidelines Committee has released The SNM Procedure Guideline for Breast Scintigraphy with Breast-Specific Gamma Cameras. This protocol serves as a guide to clinicians performing Breast-Specific Gamma Imaging (BSGI) to ensure optimal clinical results. This protocol will help improve the understanding of how and when to use this molecular breast imaging technique and the appropriate CPT coding for BSGI.

Mammography is very useful in the detection of breast cancer, but for some women, the mammogram can be difficult to interpret due to the presence of complex, dense breast tissue. In such cases, detecting cancer with mammography is similar to finding one cloud in a cloudy sky. With BSGI, the patient receives a pharmaceutical tracing agent that is absorbed by all the cells in the body. Due to their increased rate of metabolic activity, cancerous cells in the breast absorb a greater amount of the tracing agent than normal, healthy cells and generally appear as focal areas on the BSGI image. As a result, BSGI can see lesions independent of breast tissue density and discover early stage cancers hidden by complex breast tissue. Several studies have determined that combining BSGI and mammography greatly improves the detection of breast cancer over the use of either imaging study alone.

"The introduction of a procedural protocol by the Society of Nuclear Medicine represents the goal of the Society to establish and maintain the highest standard of quality in nuclear medicine imaging studies," according to Dr. Stanley Goldsmith, past president of the society and lead author of the new protocol. He continued by saying, "In order to optimize our practice of medicine, it is necessary to establish when and how to use a particular procedure. Our goal was to communicate concise guidelines to our nuclear medicine colleagues as well as to the medical community at large."

According to several recent studies, BSGI has comparable sensitivity, but superior specificity when compared to MRI. Therefore, like MRI, BSGI can detect cancers missed by the mammogram, but it leads to fewer biopsies of benign lesions. In addition, BSGI with the Dilon 6800® demonstrates a high sensitivity for identifying early stage cancers as small as 1 mm and has also been shown to improve the surgical planning in patients with cancer and in detecting cancer in high-risk patients.  

In addition to being available in the United States, Dilon's molecular imaging technology is also available in Europe, Mexico, select countries of the Middle East, parts of the Asian-Pacific basin, and the Caribbean.

About Dilon Diagnostics®

Dilon Diagnostics is bringing innovative new medical imaging products to market. Dilon's cornerstone product, the Dilon 6800, a digital high-resolution, small field-of-view gamma camera, optimized to perform BSGI, a molecular breast imaging procedure which images the metabolic activity of breast lesions through radiotracer uptake. Many leading medical centers around the country are now offering BSGI to their patients, including: New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College, New York; George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, D.C.; and The Rose, Houston. For more information on Dilon Diagnostics please visit www.dilon.com.

SOURCE Dilon Diagnostics