Women in Japan seek painless breast cancer screening

If you have ever undertaken mammograms to screen for breast cancer, you may have experienced pain during screening. Some may have heard that breast cancer screening is painful, thus they hesitate to undergo it. In fact, a petition seeking to reduce the pain of gynecological care, including breast cancer screening, has garnered more than 30,000 signatures.

In Japan, in order to improve women’s wellness, painless breast cancer screening methods are being developed.

Why is painful breast cancer screening still mainstream?

In Japan, the primary methods to detect breast cancer are mammography and ultrasound. The Japanese government recommends mammogram screening once every two years for the early detection of breast cancer in people aged 40 and older.

Mammography is a low-dose X-ray examination by compressing your breasts with two plastic boards. Mammography can detect breast calcification which can be an early sign of cancer, that an ultrasound may miss. While compression helps to produce accurate images, it can cause discomfort and severe pain.

In addition, mammography can possibly miss tumors, especially among those who have dense breast tissue because both tissue and tumors look white on a mammogram. Asian people can often have denser breasts, and so do younger generations. Among Japanese people, it is estimated that about 40% of women over the age of 40 have dense breasts. (*1)

Although ultrasounds are painless and can detect lumps which can be another sign of breast cancer in women with dense breasts, most cases say that they should not be used as a substitute for mammography.

Painless breast cancer screening “Microwave Mammography”

A Japanese company, Integral Geometry Science, has developed a painless breast screening method, “Microwave Mammography.” Kenjiro Kimura, the company’s founder and a researcher specializing in physics, realized this method by solving the “inverse scattering problem,” a difficult problem in applied mathematics.

This method takes only 10 minutes for screening by sliding a device on the surface of the breasts, and it immediately provides a 3-D image. Additionally, it can find a tiny cancerous tumor that other conventional methods struggle to show. They used the method to screen 350 people in clinical trials, and the cancer detection rate was almost 100%. (*2)

The disadvantage of microwave technology is it is only useful for detecting breast cancer. This is because microwaves can pass through adipose tissue, the main component of the breast, but not muscle.

Although this method is not in practical use yet, hopefully, the day when painless breast cancer screening becomes mainstream in Japan will come soon.

*1 Dense Breasts FAQ by the Japanese Breast Cancer Society (2018)
*2 The science of looking beneath the surface by Integral Geometry Science (2019)

[Reference] PR Times
[Reference] The Asahi Shimbun