Structural Biomarkers for Breast Cancer Determined by X-Ray Diffraction

False positives from breast cancer screenings lead to billions of dollars of waste and suffering every year. X-ray diffraction of breast tissue for cancer detection is a promising technique that can potentially be used to reduce the significant number of unnecessary biopsies by first scanning suspicious areas, rather than performing a biopsy straightaway. Breast tissue diffraction patterns contain information about the structure and density of constituent fiber molecular structures, such as fatty acids and collagen. These structural biomarkers are known to change due to the presence of tumors. We ran a pilot study with biopsies from 38 cancer patients that were scanned using a low-cost diffractometer. Our diagnostic algorithm achieved an overall performance of 96.3% sensitivity, 91.6% specificity, and 93.4% positive predictive value based on a random train-test split. We believe X-ray diffraction technology is mature enough to be integrated into the clinical setting in the near future.