Watershed Exam

Using ultrasound waves, the "breast Jacuzzi" could be the long-awaited, more comfortable alternative to mammography

As marketing phrases go, “like a Jacuzzi for your breast” has to rank right up there with, well, a Jacuzzi for your breast. Connect it not to a spa service but to breast-cancer screening, suggest that one day a nice bubbly bath might replace the hated squeezing of a mammogram, and it’s enough to make a woman start placing bets on a future Nobel Prize in medicine.
Hold your horses, ladies. The breast Jacuzzi — now under development as a machine called CURE, or Computerized Ultrasound Risk Evaluation — is still a few years down the road, if it ever arrives. But if it does, grateful patients everywhere can thank professionals in Detroit, who are developing the machine under the auspices of the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute’s Walt Breast Center.
Leading the team are Dr. Neb Duric and Dr. Peter J. Littrup, a Ph.D and M.D., respectively, who took on the project after participating in a series of Karmanos workshops some years ago.
“The [workshops were held] to brainstorm on how we might be able to approach cancer in a different way,” Duric says. The question on the table was the problem of mammography, which, while effective in detecting many cancers before they’re detectable through self-exam, still fails in enough cases to make an alternative worth researching.

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This article appears in the May 2008 of Hour Detroit.
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