(Ivanhoe Newswire) – Half of Americans are diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives. According to the National Cancer Institute, 192,370 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, and more than 40,000 women will die from it this year alone. Medical physicists are leading the fight against breast cancer with the development of new imaging technologies and improvement on existing techniques.

Mammography, the most common method of detecting breast cancer, misses up to 20 percent of breast cancer present at the time of the screening, particularly in women with dense breast tissue. Women with dense tissue are recommended to undergo a very expensive technique -- magnetic resonance imaging -- to detect cancer. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has developed a less expensive “molecular imaging” method to detect breast cancer in dense tissue through radioactive tracers. A new study supported by the Susan G. Komen Foundation will test whether the technique can be effective in small doses; the study will begin to enroll 1,000 women in a few months.