State Insurance Bills
Two new state insurance bills for expanded breast imaging coverage have been introduced:
Find It Early Act
As the 2025 Congressional session has begun, re-introduction of the federal Find it Early Act is scheduled. The Senate version has already been formally re-introduced (S1410), and the House bill re-introduction will follow soon.
New Study
Niu et al report on the effectiveness of primary screening with breast ultrasound among women in low-resource settings in rural China. 9100 women ages 35-64 underwent hand-held US (HHUS) and automated breast ultrasound (ABUS). Women over age 45 were also screened by mammography (MG). All modalities were statistically equivalent but ABUS alone performed very well.
- The overall CDR was 2.7/1000 women screened and there were no statistical differences in sensitivity and specificity among the 3 screening methods, although the CDR of ABUS was greater than HHUS or MG.¹
- ABUS detected 2 cancers missed by HHUS and MG, and, in women with dense breasts, ABUS had the highest diagnostic performance of the 3 screening methods.²
- ABUS overall accuracy in women with non-dense breasts was comparable to HHUS and mammography.³
- The proportion of women with dense breasts among women aged 45-64 was 67.5%.
¹ There were 25 cancers among 9100 women screened, with CDR of 3.0 for ABUS, 2.3 for HHUS and 2.0 for MG per 1000 women screened.
² Note: BI-RADS 3 was considered “negative” in this analysis, but typically represents a “positive” screening test; 9.9% of ABUS examinations were assessed as BI-RADS 3 in women with dense breasts (as were 12.6% of HHUS and 13.1% of MG examinations). Among women with dense breasts, ABUS sensitivity was 81.8%, specificity (with BI-RADS 3 considered negative) was 98.5%, PPV3 16.7%, NPV 99.9%, and AUC 0.902. Sensitivity of HHUS was 63.6% and of MG 54.6%, but differences were not significant.
³ Among women with non-dense breasts, sensitivity of all three modalities was 100%. ABUS specificity was 99.5%, PPV3 41.7%, NPV nearly 100% and AUC 0.998.