Baseline Mammo/Ultrasound

Hi,

Just read your post and just wanted to comment that there are some positive terms in your report i.e “oval” and “no definite internal vascularity”. Did they give you a BIRADS rating? Praying that all goes well for you 🙏

What the nurse told you is incorrect. Since they have no former imaging studies to coma or to, they scored your screening mammogram/ultrasound as a Birad 0 inconclusive and need more studies.

I am in similar situation now. I am a BC survivor of 21 years (diagnosed at 29) and I recently had my annual diagnostic mammogram (3D) and they saw an area of increased distortion. Follow up ultrasound (my first) revealed the same area and another lesion in my left breast, which is the same breast that had the cancer. Since I had no prior ultrasound to compare to, I, too, received a Birad 0 on my ultrasound and I have now been scheduled for an MRI. This is appropriate for my history. My ultrasound report hand terms like no vascular flow and posterior enhancement and a few bad terms like angular and irregular margin. I was very upset, but I’ve calmed down since doing a lot of research on Google. What they saw may be scar tissue in my radiated breast or some other b9 finding. I keep telling my self that if what they saw were highly suspicious for cancer they would have scheduled an immediate biopsy. I will have an MRI on March 12.

Hi EPNYC!

The nurse was correct. There are two reasons you might be assigned a Bi-RADs "0." One of them is simply that additional imaging is needed to make an assessment or reach a conclusion. This is often, but not always, the case with a first (or baseline) exam. Which is why there are often call-backs for women having initial mammograms.

Not everyone who is having an initial screening mammogram is assigned a Bi-RADs "0," even though there is no prior imaging. Just those where the person reading the imaging needs more information to make an assessment or reach a conclusion. It sounds like this is the case for you EPNYC--you can have confidence in what your nurse told you.

Where there are prior studies, like in Rhonda's case, the person reading the imaging may feel that they need the prior imaging studies to reach a conclusion. This is the second reason to assign a Bi-RADs "0." The person assigning the score believe that the additional information they need to reach an assessment may be in the prior imaging studies.

Here's a very helpful description of the Bi-RADs system. Scroll down to "Final Assessment Categories" to see further descriptions of this system of communicating between the doctor reading the imaging study and the people who read their report.

HTH,

LisaAlissa