Keeping abreast of the times

Wednesday, April 19, 2006
By TARESSA STOVALL
of The Montclair Times

New technology will enable doctors at the Montclair Breast Center to provide more comfortable and accurate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) screening for women at high risk for breast cancer. On March 17, the first part of the upgrade took place when a new eight-channel coil was lowered a hole cut into the side of the building at 37 North Fullerton Ave. Six days later, the machine had been dismantled to replace the old coil with the new, im-proved one.

The difference in breast cancer screening with the new coil “is like the difference between regular television and high-definition TV,” explained Glenn Hersh, chief operating officer of the Center. “They call it a high-definition upgrade.”

This upgrade was worth cutting open the building, Hersh said, because “it will increase our diagnostic capabili-ties. It will give us even better imaging and make anomalies easier to see.”

This isn’t the first time the Montclair Breast Center, renowned for its reputation as a high-quality, one-stop shop for breast cancer detection and treatment, has been reconfigured to house state-of-the-art technology. In December 2004, the building had to be renovated to accommodate the 6-ton GE Signa EXCITE 1.5 Tesla High Definition MRI system into which the new coil was placed.

Hersh and his wife, Dr. Nancy Elliott, founder and medical director of the center, estimate that of the approxi-mately 6,000 women who come to the facility for regular screening, some 5,000 are determined to be high-risk.

“The MRI doesn’t replace the mammogram,” Elliott explained. “The MRI is really for women at the highest cate-gories of risk, or as a problem-solving tool.”

The second upgrade to the MRI was an eight-channel armature upgrade, which made the base of the machine that the patient lays on more comfortable. “It enables us to do certain kinds of biopsies more effectively,” Hersh explained, “while cradling the head and positioning the arms comfortably so that the patient is completely relaxed and the body is under no tension during the imaging process.”

High-risk patients “can get everything from a mammogram to the MRI to biopsy and surgery” at the Breast Cen-ter, said Elliot, who in January was honored as one of the top women’s imaging specialists in the country by Medical Imaging magazine’s annual “Best of the Best” list.

Contact TaRessa Stovall at stovall@montclairtimes.com