Breakthrough Breast Exam Digital Technology for Clinical Skills

It is widely recognized that the earliest and most frequent sign of breast cancer is a lump, often self-detected, but missed during screening.^{1,  2 , 3} Interval, missed, and recurrent breast cancers frequently found by patients between screenings require their practitioners to have clinical breast exam skills that, until now, were not verifiable. ^{4,  5,  6}

In response, MammaCare® created the first digital technology that automatically calculates, analyzes and corrects the breast exam skills of healthcare providers, nursing and medical students before they begin examining patients.  MammaCare training is now proving that hands can rapidly gain essential breast exam skills. A clinician’s ability to perform a competent breast exam in the exam room, one that can confirm or dispel a patient-detected change, is a critical step in the diagnostic and treatment timeline.

The Clinical Breast Exam Simulator-Trainer instantly measures the examiner’s skill levels: sensitivity (detecting small suspicious lesions), specificity (false positive detections), thoroughness (percent of tissue examined vs. missed), analyzes and presents the palpation search patterns.

In practice, a clinician or student simply logs on to the web portal and begins examining a series of cloud-connected breast models containing replicas of excised breast cancers. The online training program guides the examiner’s fingers as they learn to positively identify sub-centimeter breast lumps while learning to avoid false positive detections.

When the examiner’s or student’s performance does not meet built-in standards, the system automatically presents feedback about exam deficiencies and requests the examiner to repeat the exam.

Mark Kane Goldstein, Ph.D. MammaCare Foundation Sr. Scientist reported: “A few hours of practice, using any computer connected to the Trainer will measurably improve a provider’s ability to confirm and report suspicious breast lesions for further diagnostic workup.” He added: “Strong evidence now indicates that merging the human tactile sensory system with advanced engineering technology supports the early detection of breast cancer.” ^{7,  8}

Mark Kane Goldstein
3523750607
[email protected]