Miles away from the nearest imaging center and
wearing a kimono instead of a medical gown, I
am sitting at the kitchen table in my Brooklyn apartment with
Matthew Campisi, a professor of electrical and computer
engineering at NYU. Goateed and genial, Campisi has
stopped by to give me a demo of iBreastExam, a handheld
breast-cancer-scanning device that he and fellow med-tech
entrepreneur Mihir Shah began developing in 2009 as part of
their UE LifeSciences health care start-up. “This is it,” he
announces, removing the innocuous-looking pink-and-white
appliance from a brown leather box.
Resembling a travel-size clothing steamer, the device uses
an electronic sensor similar to a smartphone’s touchscreen
to detect abnormal breast lumps as small as five millimeters.
Cloud-connected and radiation-free, it allows health care
workers to perform breast exams anywhere, in minutes, and
without a degree in radiology. Over the past three years,
iBreastExam—which has a distribution partnership with GE
and has attracted research grants as well as venture capital
funding—has been deployed in parts of the developing world
where mammograms are scarce due to their high cost, a
lack of electricity, or a dearth of radiologists (India has just
one for every 100,000 people). Its usage has proliferated
across Asia, Mexico, and Africa, where it has already screened
HE ALTH
Ahead of the Curve
Designed to bring low-cost breast-cancer-
screening technolog y to the developing world, the
iBreastExam—an easy-to-use, mobile-compatible
device—arrives Stateside with a big mission:
to democratize early detection. By Jancee Dunn.
a quarter-million women—and as of this month, the rollout
is under way with gynecologists and primary-care physicians
in select U.S. cities. It is poised to be the biggest innovation
in early breast-cancer detection since the mammogram was
widely introduced in 1963—and the average American doctor
has never heard of it.
Part of that is by design, explains Campisi, who has close
relatives who have survived breast cancer. “Our original
plan was to fill a huge need specifically in the developing
world, as most diagnoses were coming in at a very late stage,”
he says. “And then a light bulb went off.” Why, he and
Shah—an adjunct faculty member at Drexel University’s
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health
Systems—wondered, shouldn’t they try to get the device
approved for use in the United States?
“A quarter of patients in this country should be getting
mammograms and just don’t,” says Brian Englander, M.D.,
chairman of radiology at Pennsylvania Hospital and an
associate professor of clinical radiology at Penn’s Perelman
School of Medicine, who has been conducting
BODY OF EVIDENCE
GETTING AHEAD OF A BREAST-CANCER DIAGNOSIS IS KEY TO FIGHTING
THE DISEASE—AND TO THE MOMENTUM BEHIND THE HANDHELD TOOL,
WHICH REQUIRES NO RADIATION, NO COMPRESSION, AND PROVIDES
RESULTS IMMEDIATELY.
HEALTH>130
128 OCTOBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
VICTOR DE SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE SOURCE
VLIFE
