Earlier this year we reported that a key article appeared online in Diagnostics, an open-access journal published by the Swiss-based Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). This week the MDPI informed us they had featured our article as the Cover Story for issue 1 of volume 7, where Aceso takes centre stage with the title of our paper, “Detecting Breast Cancer with a Dual-Modality Device,” prominently displayed. In addition, the online version of the Cover Story also highlights an abbreviated abstract:

“Full-field digital mammography (FFDM) has been the gold standard for early detection of breast cancer, but if a woman has dense breast tissue, a false negative diagnosis may occur, with devastating consequences: more costly treatment and a poorer prognosis. Because ultrasound can penetrate dense fibro-glandular tissue, we have developed and tested a single imaging system that integrates both FFDM and automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) in a single platform. Our Aceso system has shown the potential of co-registered FFDM and ABUS images to detect breast cancer early in a busy clinic.”

The paper resulted from a collaboration between: lead author Kamila Padia, head of radiology at 2 Military Hospital; Tania Douglas, director of the Medical Imaging Research Unit in Cape Town; Lydia Cairncross, head of the breast clinic at Groote Schuur Hospital; and CapeRay engineers Roland Baasch and Kit Vaughan. Because Diagnostics is an open-access journal  all the articles can be freely retrieved so that, theoretically at least, the research findings will be available to a larger audience. So how has the article about Aceso fared in the eight months since it first appeared?

Seen above is a graph of the number of views and downloads over the past three months. To date there have been 1,857 people who have viewed the abstract while 807 have downloaded the PDF version of the full paper. The majority of these readers have been from the USA, China, Russia, France and the UK. These are extremely encouraging numbers.

The publication about Aceso in Diagnostics marked an important milestone for CapeRay. The findings constituted a key component of our Clinical Evaluation Report (CER), a document required by our Notified Body as part of the CE Mark audit, where the CER is intended to demonstrate that Aceso achieves its intended purpose without exposing users and patients to unnecessary risk. We will shortly be launching a large clinical trial of Aceso with Dr Kamila Padia, thereby extending our commitment to demonstrate the benefits of dual-modality imaging.