by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | May 30, 2012
From the May 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
At the 2011 RSNA show and conference, Dr. Stephen Rose, founder and president of Houston Breast Imaging, presented research and personal experiences regarding tomosynthesis.
Before founding his practice 11 years ago, Rose spent 13 years in radiology at a general practice with the last five years focused on breast imaging. “I decided it could be done better if I was in a practice strictly focused on breast imaging,” he said.
Today, he’s among a group of 14 breast radiologists, offering services to 10 facilities around Houston. The practice reads over 100,000 screening mammograms per year, with about 20% of those being diagnostic and a similar percentage in ultrasounds. About 500 to 600 biopsies are also performed each year.
Putting up those kinds of numbers attracted the attention of Hologic, who looked to Houston Breast Imaging as a launching pad to test its tomosynthesis technology.
Rose believes there is an incredible amount of promise in the technology for multiple reasons. For patients, it’s a better experience because there isn’t need for much pressure on the breast to acquire the image. The acquisition is quick too – about seven seconds. Perhaps the biggest benefit has been the change in callbacks. “We’ve seen our callback rates drop by about 50 percent in our practice,” Rose said. “And this is across multiple radiologists in multiple locations, and that’s comparing to our historical callback rates which we track very closely.”
“We’re also finding very small cancers that we couldn’t see before, finding tumors less than one centimeter. Those people that have a tumor less than one centimeter – when you find them at that size, you’re essentially looking at a cure in most patients,” Rose said.
For all the apparent benefits, there are still challenges to overcome. For one, the relative newness of digital mammography and the recent investments in that technology by many facilities mean it’s unlikely they’ll turn around and spring for something new so soon. Even for those that do, a second financial hurdle is the lack of reimbursement. Currently, there’s no specific reimbursement code. Rose predicts it will ultimately land within 20 percent of the current 2-D mammogram reimbursement scale. But Rose holds high hopes for the technology. “It’s a new world for breast imaging. I predict this will be the way we will screen for breast cancer in the near future – that it will completely replace 2-D mammography in five years.”
