THE Pentagon is turning its attention from the war on communism to the war
on cancer by adapting military technologies to detect breast tumours.
Supporters say the programme, which could help to save some of the 46 000
American women who die of breast cancer each year, could reveal the true
potential of defence conversion.
鈥淚f we can image missiles 15 000 miles away in distant skies and with the
Hubble telescope can see craters on Mars, we should be able to develop better
tools to image small tumours in women鈥檚 breasts that are right in front of
us,鈥� says Susan Blumenthal, assistant surgeon general. 鈥淭he military state of
the art is more than a decade ahead of medical applications.鈥�
Blumenthal told a Congressional hearing earlier this month that the
military machines with the most promise for fighting cancer are computer
systems that pick out specific patterns from images. The Pentagon is
developing these 鈥渁utomatic target recognition systems鈥� to pinpoint tanks and
other military targets automatically from images taken by spy satellites or
aircraft. But they can be adapted to spot a tumour in a mammogram, says
Michael Henry, a researcher at Martin Marietta, the US鈥檚 largest aerospace
company.
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In partnership with Rose Health Care System of Denver, the company has
developed a device that will do just this. The machine breaks up a mammogram
into 30 million pixels and measures the brightness of each. It compares these
measurements with those in a database of tumours, and a neural network then
鈥渄ecides鈥� whether the mammogram shows a tumour.
The system, which has still to undergo clinical testing, could analyse a
patient鈥檚 mammograms in less than a minute and detect tumours smaller than a
millimetre across, says Henry. At present, radiologists find it difficult to
spot tumours smaller than 5 millimetres across, he says. Earlier diagnosis
means earlier, cheaper treatment and gives patients a better chance of
recovery.
The system could also be adapted to recognise abnormalities from other
medical tests, such as chest X-rays and cervical smears, says Henry. In
regions which have a shortage of trained mammographers, hospitals could send
their images to central units for virtually instant analysis.
Military officials have produced a long list of technologies that might be
useful in detecting cancers. Dwight Duston, director of science and technology
at the Pentagon鈥檚 Star Wars office, says the free-electron laser, once
trumpeted as a weapon for destroying incoming enemy missiles, could be used to
produce a beam of high-quality X-rays that would reduce a woman鈥檚 exposure to
radiation during mammography.
Similarly, charge-coupled devices 鈥� the photosensitive semiconductors used
in video cameras 鈥� could replace the film on which mammograms are recorded,
says Duston. And the Pentagon鈥檚 research in virtual reality, developed for
battlefield simulations, could be adapted to help surgeons rehearse
lumpectomies and tumour biopsies.
But the road to applying military technology to medical problems may be a
long one. Duston says his office has had much more success spinning off
devices in fields such as transport than in medicine. He says doctors have
resisted new technology out of fear that they might be replaced by machines.
Also, defence technology is often expensive, and the American healthcare
industry is under intense pressure to cut costs.