#Industry News
Focus on Women: Trends in Breast Ultrasound | Predictions for the future of breast imaging with ultrasound
The breast ultrasound market is seeing growth, driven largely by the proliferation of recent legislation aimed at addressing the unique challenges of imaging dense breast patients.
Today, many governmental screening programs encourage the use of breast ultrasound for women with dense breast tissue, largely because ultrasound can differentiate between normal dense tissue and lesions better than traditional 2-D mammography. As the breast ultrasound market continues to grow, its impact on the breast care continuum naturally rises in tandem.
Amidst this market expansion, it becomes increasingly important to understand today’s breast ultrasound trends, as they hint at where the industry is headed in the future and predict what we can expect to see in the coming years.
The Rise of Shear Wave Elastography
Although ultrasound receives exceptional marks for sensitivity, its specificity has long been a shortcoming of the modality with notable opportunities for improvement. In response, shear wave elastography has been growing in popularity thanks to its ability to help increase clinicians’ diagnostic accuracy and subsequently impact specificity.
Although some professionals gave shear wave elastography a somewhat lackluster welcoming in the technology’s infancy due to uncertainty surrounding its usefulness, the latest generations of shear wave elastography have reversed this perception for many thanks to its notable benefits and improvements, including the clear diagnostic value the technology imparts. Today, the added value of shear wave elastography is recognized by major scientific societies in ultrasound, and it is backed by a long track record of scientific research with countless breast imaging publications. Shear wave elastography has been found to aid in the diagnostic workup of breast lesions, which positively impacts patient management.It also helps with targeting lesions during the ultrasound-guided biopsy, and it contributes to an accurate lesion size measurement.
