According to the American Cancer Society, more than 180,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer this year and close to 40,000 will die from it. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for women. But researchers join their efforts to find a way to reduce these numbers.

A new experimental method, molecular breast imaging, or MBI, detected three times as many breast cancers in higher-risk women who have a lot of dense tissue that makes tumours hard to detect by mammograms. About one-fourth of women aged 40 and older have dense breasts.

Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which has been working on the technique for six years, called MBI a “promising technology.” It would not replace mammograms, but doctors can combine the two techniques to detect more tumours. Both methods use radiation, but in a different way.

The new technique uses an injected radiotracer to detect differences in the behaviour of cancer tissue as compared to normal tissue.

Researchers tried both MBI and mammography on 940 women who had dense breasts and a high risk of cancer because of family history and found that MBI detected 10 out of 13 tumors compared to mammograms that detected three out of 13 tumors. Using both methods, 11 out of 13 tumors would have been detected. There was no significant difference in the number of false positive results detected by both methods.

The technique is already in advanced testing. The results will be presented this week at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Washington.

Today, there are more than 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States.