Digital tomosynthesis: a new future for breast imaging?

The aim of this article is to review the major limitations in current mammography and to describe how these may be addressed by digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT). DBT is a novel imaging technology in which an x-ray fan beam sweeps in an arc across the breast, producing tomographic images and enabling the production of volumetric, three-dimensional (3D) data. It can reduce tissue overlap encountered in conventional two-dimensional (2D) mammography, and thus has the potential to improve detection of breast cancer, reduce the suspicious presentations of normal tissues, and facilitate accurate differentiation of lesion types. This paper reviews the latest studies of this new technology. Issues including diagnostic efficacy, reading time, radiation dose, and level of compression; cost and new innovations are considered.