Breast Ultrasound

With ultrasound imaging or scanning, high-frequency sound waves produce a picture of the inside of your breast. Physicians use breast ultrasound or sonography to evaluate lumps found by you or your healthcare provider, or abnormalities found on mammography. It’s also used to gain information about the size and location of suspected tumors and to guide biopsy. If you’re a woman at high risk for breast cancer and you have dense tissue on mammography, your physician may order screening ultrasound in addition to mammography.

How Breast Ultrasound Works

Breast ultrasound works like the sonar relied on by ships, fishermen, and bats. A sound wave strikes an object and echoes bounce back. Measuring these echo waves enables the machine to create a picture of the object’s size, shape, and consistency.

Preparing For Your Exam

For your breast ultrasound, please wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothes. To obtain a detailed picture, the machine needs to be in contact with your skin. During a portion of the exam, you will need to remove all clothing on the part of your body that’s being examined. You may be asked to wear a gown.

Why Physicians Use Breast Ultrasound

Breast ultrasound scanning gives a clear picture of soft tissues that don’t always show up well on x-rays. The exam provides real-time imaging, making it a good tool for guiding minimally invasive procedures like biopsies and aspirations.

What the Exam is Like

You will lie on your back with your arm raised above your head on the exam table. The Radiology & Imaging technologist applies a clear water-based gel to the skin over the area of your body being studied. The gel helps the machine’s transducer make contact with the body. It also eliminates air pockets, improving image quality. The ultrasound technologist presses the transducer firmly against your skin and sweeps it over the study area. You can expect an ultrasound exam to take about 30 minutes.

The Exam’s Benefits & Risks

With ultrasound, physicians can often confirm that breast lumps are normal or benign (non-cancerous). Mammography alone can’t always do this. The exam poses a very low to non-existent risk. When an ultrasound exam cannot tell whether or not a breast abnormality is harmless, your physician may recommend an ultrasound-guided aspiration or biopsy.

The Limits of Breast Ultrasound

While ultrasound is a key tool for breast imaging, it doesn’t replace your annual mammogram or a careful clinical breast exam. Ultrasound doesn’t reveal all cancers and doesn’t always tell for certain if a mass is cancerous. However, studies show that for high-risk women with dense tissue, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can help supplement mammography by detecting small breast cancers not visible with mammography alone.

We Subspecialize in Reading Breast Images

Radiology & Imaging uses high-resolution, state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment. The diagnostic detail our equipment provides is exceptional. Having radiologists who subspecialize in reading breast images on our team means more expertise and experience is at work for you.

Our offices also offer ultrasound studies of the abdomen, kidneys, thyroid, pelvis and leg veins.

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