Can I use the hardness levels to benchmark the difference between malignant or benign cancers?
SureTouch translates the physical exam into a digital reproducible record. Those things that identify the physical exam (shape, size, firmness, consistency) are translated onto the screen. Shape and size are clear. Firmness of an area seen on SureTouch is a measure of the relative firmness of the target lesion relative to the surrounding breast tissue. There are no absolute figures that can be used to diagnose a lesion. Some hard lesions are cancers, cysts, and fibroadenomas. There may also be some softer cancers such as mucinous cancers, although these are still harder than surrounding breast tissue, but not as hard as the prior examples. So, in essence, the hardness measure is a guide as to how different the target lesion is, relative to the normal breast tissue that surrounds it. In an older fatty replaced breast, a fibroadenoma might have a hardness scale of over 4, while the same fibroadenoma in a dense glandular breast might only have a 2.5 rating of hardness. In either case, the
