Isle doctor plans
ultrasound projectThe medical director believes
it can aid in cancer screening
Dr. Laura Hoque, medical director of Kapiolani Women's Health Center, said she became interested in ultrasound screening for breast cancer when it picked up a friend's cancer missed by a mammogram.
"Screening with ultrasound today is not a standard test, but I believe, as well as a lot of other people, that it is one of the up and coming things," she said.
Her interest led to a study at Kapiolani to assess whether ultrasound is effective in finding breast cancer.
She recently received a $30,000 grant from the Alana Dung Research Foundation, giving her a total of nearly $200,000 from various sources for the project. She said she hopes to have ongoing funding.
She plans to do free ultrasound screening for about 2,000 women to see how it compares with standard mammogram screening.
Ultrasound is more effective than mammography for detecting abnormalities in Asian women who typically have very dense breast tissue, she said, so it has potential for great impact in Hawaii's population.
The Hawaii Medical Service Association will pay for diagnostic ultrasound, looking at a spot in question on a mammogram. But it doesn't cover ultrasound screening for breast cancer detection because it hasn't been proven to be effective, Hoque said.
In pilot studies, however, ultrasound plus mammography increased cancer detection by 17 percent, compared to mammography alone, she said.
This would mean of 1,100 breast cancer cases diagnosed annually, an additional 190 cases possibly could be caught that might be missed with present screening methods, she said.
"Critics say 'You're going to find a lot of things' and the biopsy rate will increase," she said. I hope to show that we don't have a very big biopsy rate. I'd like to keep it around 10 percent."
The same criticism was voiced for a computer-aided detection (CAD) system to screen for breast cancer and "those worries have not really panned out," she noted.
Hoque said her study is limited by radiologists' time because they actually perform the breast cancer procedures while technicians handle ultrasound for other parts of the body.
"We have two dedicated breast imagers; they're excellent, but we need three," she said, adding that a third radiologist is being recruited from the mainland.