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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | April 12, 2012
But the company says there's already some clinical evidence out there for 3-D mammography, citing a 2008 study published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, and run by Emory University researchers, which found stereoscopic digital mammography upped sensitivity and specificity of exams. According to the study, which involved about 1,450 patients, stereoscopic mammo increased its ability to find breast lesions by 23 percent, and to rule out false positives by about 46 percent.
Drawbacks
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Hotchkiss said no drawbacks have been reported in the studies so far, but there are some potential limitations. One is that about 2 to 3 percent of people lack full stereo vision, often for neurological reasons, according to Held, the Berkeley researcher.
Also, if you remember the launch of Nintendo's 3DS game system -- a portable game console with a glasses-free 3D screen -- some people using 3-D for extended lengths of time reported eye strain and headaches. "One of the main causes of fatigue is that your eyes have to work hard to stay focused at a different distance than where your eyes are pointed," Held says.
However, in a paper Held co-authored with Tiffany T. Hui in Academic Radiology last year, he noted that this problem, known as the vergence-accommodation conflict, mostly affects those under 50, as the lens of the eye hardens with age. Viewer discomfort can also be mitigated by product design and by the user adopting a proper posture, Held said. And Hotchkiss said as far as their product was concerned, physiological studies conducted in Japan found no difference between 2-D and 3-D reads.
Of course, more will be known when the device, reported to cost around $181,000 in Japan (U.S. prices have not been released), finally reaches American markets. Hotchkiss said the scanner that you need to work with it, the Aspire HD Plus, would be launched probably in the late summer. But Fujifilm still needs to file a premarket approval submission with the Food and Drug Administration for the mammography workstation itself, something they expect to do by 2013.
If you're in Japan, however, you'll have a chance to get an earlier look at it. Fujifilm is expected to show the device at the International Technical Exhibition of Medical Imaging 2012, which is being held at the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall, starting Friday.
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