Technetium-99m sestamibi in the diagnosis of breast cancer. The Mayagüez Medical Center experience.

The most successful screening procedures for breast cancer are breast physical examination and mammography. However, mammography has a positive predictive value of 15-30% for nonpalpable malignancy and of 22% for palpable carcinoma; this results in a large number of biopsies on patients with benign lesions. Furthermore, the benefit of mammography in woman with dense breast tissue (< 50 years old) has been questioned. Different studies have shown that Scintimammography with Tc-99m has a high sensitivity and specificity for detecting breast cancer (average of 85% and 89%, respectively), with higher positive predictive value for palpable lesions (89%). We reviewed retrospectively 35 records of patients that had Scintimammography in our institution, and the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were similar to other centers (100%, 76%, 62.5% and 100%, respectively). So, Scintimammography may be a complement for current diagnostic techniques for breast malignancy in our setting.