Researchers have found a new screening tool to breast cancer in women that works three times better than mammography at finding tumors in women who have dense breast tissue.

Four studies being presented this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2008 Breast Cancer Symposium in Washington, D.C., say that molecular breast imaging (MBI) could one day be added to conventional mammography in women at a higher risk of developing the disease.

Using an injected radiotracer, MBI is able to detect differences in the behavior of cancer tissue as compared to normal tissue. The research is still carried on MBI which is not commonly available to women.

The study, involving 940 women, is the largest to date to compare MBI to mammography. In this study, MBI detected 10 of 13 cancers among 375 patients completing a 15-month follow-up period. Mammography, by contrast, detected three of 13 cancers.

Also, the number of biopsies that actually resulted in cancer was much higher with MBI (28 percent) than with mammography (18 percent). The research is still carried on MBI which is not commonly available to women.

The MIB uses a radioactive agent that gets absorbed by breast tissue and cancer cells tend to absorb more of it than healthy cells thus indicating the presence of tumors, which may sometimes be left undetected by mammogram.

Also, the number of biopsies that actually resulted in cancer was much higher with MBI (28 percent) than with mammography (18 percent). Some 184,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2008, and about 41,000 women will die of the disease, studies say.