Technetium-99m sestamibi in the diagnosis of breast cancer. The Mayagüez Medical Center experience

ABSTRACT

The most successful screening procedures for breast cancer are breast physical examination and mammography. However, mammography has a positive predictive value of 15-30 for nonpalpable malignancy and of 22 for palpable carcinoma; this results in a large number of biopsies on patients with benign lesions. Furthermore, the benefit of mammography in woman with dense breast tissue (< 50 years old) has been questioned. Different studies have shown that Scintimammography with Tc-99m has a high sensitivity and specificity for detecting breast cancer (average of 85 and 89, respectively), with higher positive predictive value for palpable lesions (89). We reviewed retrospectively 35 records of patients that had Scintimammography in our institution, and the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were similar to other centers (100, 76, 62.5 and 100, respectively). So, Scintimammography may be a complement for current diagnostic techniques for breast malignancy in our setting: