Читать книгу Overcome the Challenges of Cancer Care - M. D. Rosenberg - Страница 18

Although the quality of scans has improved dramatically over the past 20 years, imaging still has significant limitations. With current technology, doctors are unable to see a single cancer cell or even a few million cancer cells on a scan. If we could see every single cancer cell in the body, we would really be onto something big—closer to curing many cancers!

If masses are less than one centimeter (0.4 inches), scans can’t reliably separate cancer from normal masses. Imagine plants in a garden: early on, it may be hard to distinguish a weed from the flower you planted!

Once there’s a one-centimeter mass, the mass is already somewhere between one hundred million and a billion cells. To give you a sense of scale, the population of Canada is about thirty-seven million, there are about seven to eight billion people on the planet, and there are about two hundred billion stars in our galaxy.

The size and shape of a mass tells us a lot about whether that mass might be cancer. But it takes more than a machine to find cancer. For doctors, having clinical expertise and taking into account the patient’s whole picture is critical.