Diagnostic of breast cancer: what do clinicians expect from PEM?

Early detection of breast cancer is crucial for efficient and effective treatment. Functional breast imaging could improve imaging of such lesions because it provides a non-invasive method in the screening of women for the presence of the disease, as well as for staging disease and tracking its response to therapy. Dedicated breast PET imaging, called positron emission mammography (PEM), is a new technique to obtain images of the breast for detection of radiopharmaceutical-avid tumours. Metabolic images from PEM contain unique information not available from conventional morphologic imaging techniques and aid in establishing the diagnosis of breast cancer. Therefore, PEM might be used for staging, characterising indeterminate lesions, and finding occult lesions in those patients who are difficult to scan with mammography. PEM promises to achieve low-cost directed functional examination of breast abnormalities, with the potential for performing X-ray correlation and image-guided biopsy. However, at present, published data on the use of PEM in breast cancer are still too limited for establishing the role of this particular technique.