Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium awarded $15 million grant renewal from National Cancer Institute

The Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) — including Radiology Professor and Director of Breast Imaging at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance Janie Lee, M.D., M.Sc., and Radiology Professor and Breast Imaging Fellowship Director Christoph Lee, M.D., M.S., MBA — was awarded a 5-year $15 million grant renewal from the National Cancer Institute.

The grant renewal, titled “Advancing Equitable Risk-based Breast Cancer Screening and Surveillance in Community Practice,” aims to improve early breast cancer detection of aggressive tumors and optimize screening and surveillance using risk-based approaches.  

With this grant renewal, the group will conduct three complementary projects:  

Project 1 will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict which women with no history of breast cancer are at high risk of being diagnosed with advanced cancer. The team will develop advanced breast cancer risk models that include imaging features and evaluate FDA-approved AI scores from five vendors. Researchers will compare the risks and benefits of mammogram screening frequency on breast cancer mortality based on women’s advanced cancer risk.

Project 2, led by Dr. Christoph Lee, takes a multilevel approach to identify woman-, neighborhood-, radiologist-, and facility-level factors that drive inequities in breast cancer screening performance and outcomes, and to explore whether targeted AI use and other facility-level interventions can improve population outcomes with attention to health equity. 

Project 3, led by Dr. Janie Lee, seeks to improve equitable surveillance by reducing surveillance mammography failures (interval second breast cancers) at the points of risk stratification and imaging interpretation and by examining social determinants of health as multilevel drivers of surveillance failures and targets for future interventions. 

The findings from this research project will play a critical role in reducing breast cancer disparities and promoting equitable, risk-based screening and surveillance. 

You can learn more about the BCSC and the new research studies here and here.