Deborah Rhodes – a leader in breast cancer research and her Michael Gladwell moment!
While browsing Talks on “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”, I came across a Talk about a tool that finds three times more breast tumours.
Deborah Rhodes is an expert at managing breast-cancer risk. She is the director of the Mayo Clinic's Executive Health Program and is currently testing a gamma camera that can see tumours that get missed due to dense breasts. Traditional mammography still cannot detect the early onset of breast cancer in as many as 1 of every 4 women ages 40-49 and women with dense breast tissue are 4 to 6 times more likely to develop cancer than others.
Rhodes had her light bulb moment while reading an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker on innovation. Gladwell made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius.
Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things they don't ordinarily talk about.
This statement from Rhodes encompassed everything we are learning in Leadership Thunder Bay and what I witness and feel every time I am engrossed by a TED Talk.
Originally I was drawn to this video because breast cancer does run in my family (of course I was chocked up at the end), but this video is much more than just the right minds getting together at the right time.
It really hit home for me because not only are we learning that it takes a team, community, and/or group of people to enable leaders to be at their fullest potential but we are also reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and realizing that the mind is a powerful entity influenced by intuition and stereotypes.
I hope that we can all find the passion that Rhodes exhibits. The more and more I am exposed to these amazing leaders around the world and in our backyard the more I search for my reason for being and what I WILL do to change my life and maybe someone else’s for the better.
The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
While at a conference Rhodes was introduced to a nuclear physicist, Micheal O'Connor, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging. He was telling Rhodes about a new type of gamma detector. The traditional machine is huge with bulky tubes and Rhodes had thought in her early years of using this type of detector for breast cancer because breast density doesn't influence the results of the test, but it just couldn't get close enough around the breasts. The new gamma detector O'Connor mentioned was made of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that served as the gamma detector. Rhodes and O'Connor discussed the issue of breast density and they quickly realized that this new technology could be easily manipulated to get close enough around the breast to actually find small tumours. Rhodes indicated that after putting together a grid of these cubes with duct tape, hacking off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out they attached the new detector, and decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging, or MBI.
Rhodes collaborated with a nuclear physicist, an internist, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, who were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape. They faced high doses of scepticism in those early years but they were so convinced that they might be able to make this work that they chipped away with incremental modifications to this system. The duct tape is now gone and they added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved the tumour detection.
"MBI detects three times as many breast tumors as mammography in high-risk women. Although it would not replace mammograms, it might become an additional tool for screening, especially in higher risk women with a dense tissue that makes tumors hard to spot. " CTV News, Sept. 4, 2008
The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but sadly it's not yet widely available.
For the full TED Talk please visit http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_rhodes.html.
2 comments:
Great job Kimberly!
The great news is that Molecular Breast Imaging equipment is also available from Dilon Diagnostics and is at over 150 centers worldwide. It's equipment has been FDA approved since 1999 and is commercially available. SNM has published guidelines on using the procedure. You can learn more about the procedure on an upcoming segment on a highly rated NBC medical talk show in the coming weeks.
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