Is there a clinical role for scintimammography in breast cancer diagnosis?

Scintimammography is the functional imaging study of the breast with singlephoton radiopharmaceuticals, such as 99mTc-sestamibi or 99mTc-tetrofosmin. In 1994, Khalkhali et al. (1) reported the first series with a relatively large number of patients on the clinical application of scintimammography. In their group of 59 patients, in whom an abnormal mammogram and physical examination warranted biopsy or fine-needle cytology of the breast, the sensitivity of scintimammography was 95.8%, specificity was 86.8%, positive predictive value was 82.1%, and negative predictive value was 97.1%. On the basis of these results, the authors concluded that scintimam-