Local hospital offers new technology for breast cancer detection, treatment

When you make your living screening others for breast cancer, a new detection device can be exciting.

Mammographer Rita Schomaker calls the new Breast Gamma Camera at Health East's Breast Care Center at St. John's Hospital in Maplewood, "?a fantastic tool."

Schomaker asked to be screened with the new camera when it arrived at the Breast Care Center this February. She says, "I feel like I was very blessed to be in that study group."

The Breast Gamma Camera found that Schomaker had cancer, cancer not detected by her mammogram five months earlier.

With just light compression, the Breast Gamma Camera takes pictures of an injected tracing agent in the breast.

Anita Eicher, HealthEast's radiology supervisor for the Breast Care Center, says the tracing agents are attracted to cancer. The cancer then shows up as a dark spot on the image. The camera found Schomaker's cancer very early when it was very small.

To treat her cancer, Schomaker had a lumpectomy and then tried a form of radiation also new at the Breast Care Center called MammoSite.

With MammoSite, a surgeon inserts a catheter with a balloon on the end, into the lumpectomy cavity. The balloon is inflated to fill the cavity. Then a radioactive seed is fed through the catheter into the balloon and left for ten minutes. There are ten treatments overall.

Dr. Diane Ogren of St. Paul Surgeons says MammoSite allows doctors to, "?give an intense dose of radiation over a shorter period of time to the area that's at the highest risk."

While conventional radiation therapy can take six or more weeks, MammoSite takes just five days.

Schomaker says both new technologies made finding and treating her cancer much easier.

"It's just really hard to believe that I've gone through all of this because I really don't feel any different now than I did in February."

While the Breast Gamma Camera does not replace mammography, it is better able to detect tumors in women with dense breast tissue or those with implants.

And not everyone qualifies for treatment with MammoSite. You must be over age 45, with just one tumor and no lymph node involvement.

For more information, click on the links above.

By Renee Tessman, KARE 11 News

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