Small-angle x-ray scattering: chance of direct cancer diagnosis

Early diagnosis of breast cancer is carried out routinely by conventional mammography. Often diagnostic findings are made which are not to be judged surely with the available diagnostics, therefore tissue samples are necessary. With small-Angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) it seems to distinguish only by images without invasive techniques between benign and malign tissues. Mammary tissue is mostly made of collagen filaments, which are oriented in a specific structure in healthy tissue, but disturbed in cancer. Diffraction measurements with SAXS form a statistical measurement method for identifying the supramolecular arrangement of these filaments. Differences in the diffraction pattern allow to deduce indirectly on the evidence of cancer tissue.^1,2  The same applies for collagen filaments in healthy and respectively arthrotic modified cartilage.
SAXS (and also the phase contrast imaging in project D.1.4.) requires a highly brilliant x-ray source based on the high performance laser of research area A.2.3. 

1) M. Fernandez, et al., “Human breast cancer in vitro: matching histo-pathology with small-angle x-ray scattering and diffraction enhanced x-ray imaging”, Phys. Med. Biol. 50, 2991 (2005).
2) R. Lewis, et al., “Breast cancer diagnosis using scattered x-rax”, J. Synchrotron Rad. 7, 348 (2000).