clipped from: today.reuters.com 
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new type of ultrasound was highly effective at determining whether lumps in the female breast were cancerous or harmless, U.S. researchers who conducted a small study said on Monday.
The finding, if confirmed in a larger trial, could reduce the number of unnecessary breast biopsies and reassure women that their tumors are harmless, said Richard Barr, a radiologist at Southwoods X-Ray and Open MRI in Youngstown, Ohio, who conducted the study.
"If we can document that the technique is extremely accurate, I think it will give women the assurance that (a tumor) is benign and they don't have to worry," Barr said. "With the existing technology, that is not there."
Known as elasticity imaging, the technique is essentially a powerful version of conventional ultrasound. Using a special software program developed by Siemens Medical Solutions, a unit of the German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG, radiologists tracked the movement of breast tissue during an ultrasound to determine the stiffness of an object.
Barr studied 166 suspected breast tumors in 99 women who were scheduled for biopsy. The lesions were measured using both the standard ultrasound technique and elasticity ultrasound.
Radiologists characterized breast lesions that appeared smaller using the elasticity ultrasound as harmless, while lesions that appeared larger using the elasticity ultrasound were characterized as malignant.