Breast cancer is a serious disease that accounts for approximately 40,000 deaths per year in the United States. Unfortunately, there is no known cause of breast cancer, and therefore the best way to prevent mortality is early detection. In the past 15 years, breast cancer mortality has been reduced significantly, which is in part due to screening with film-screen mammography. Nonetheless, conventional mammography lacks sensitivity, especially for certain subgroups of women such as those with dense breast tissue, those under 50 years old, and pre- or perimenopausal women. In addition, mammography has a very poor positive predictive value for biopsy, with 70%-90% of biopsies performed turning out negative. By improving visualization of breast tissue, X-ray computerized tomography (CT) of the breast can potentially provide improvements in diagnostic accuracy over conventional mammography. Owing to recent technological developments in digital detector technology, flat-panel CT imagers dedicated to imaging of the breast are now feasible. A number of academic groups are currently researching dedicated breast CT and prototype systems are currently being evaluated in the clinical setting.

中文翻译：

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乳房CT。

乳腺癌是一种严重的疾病，在美国每年导致约40,000人死亡。不幸的是，尚无已知的乳腺癌病因，因此预防死亡的最佳方法是及早发现。在过去的15年中，乳腺癌的死亡率已显着降低，部分原因是使用胶片X线乳腺摄影进行筛查。然而，常规的乳房X线照相术缺乏敏感性，特别是对于某些女性亚组，例如具有浓密乳腺组织的女性，50岁以下的女性以及绝经前或围绝经期的女性。另外，乳房X线照相术对活检的阳性预测值非常差，其中70％-90％的活检结果为阴性。通过改善乳房组织的可视化，乳房X射线计算机断层扫描（CT）可能比传统的乳腺X线摄影术提供更高的诊断准确性。由于数字检测器技术的最新技术发展，专用于乳房成像的平板CT成像仪现已可行。当前，许多学术团体正在研究专用的乳腺CT，目前正在临床环境中评估原型系统。