This might be the future of breast imaging. It’s not just 3D mammography, or digital breast tomosynthesis, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011 – it’s how and where the technology is being offered.

Jefferson-Solis Mammography is open now in the Flourtown Shopping Center in a space that used to be a tanning salon, just a few doors up from a pizza parlor, and just across the parking lot from a movie theater and a Giant supermarket.

“This is our 18th center in partnership with Jefferson Health,” explains Dr. Emily Sedgwick, chief medical officer at Solis Mammography. “What’s really nice about it is that, in many populated urban centers in particular, the only access women have is to an academic medical center where you have to find parking or even pay for parking. Whereas in Flourtown, you can park right out front and it’s easy to walk in. It’s also a screening facility. So, it’s in and out for both a screening mammogram and then also for a screening ultrasound.”

Though 3D mammography has been the standard of care for more than a decade, it’s still something of a marvel compared to its 2D predecessor, and there have been improvements and enhancements.

The easiest way of thinking about 2D versus 3D mammography, Sedgwick said, is as if you’re looking at a book. 2D mammography is like looking at the cover and “a 3D mammogram is when you actually open up the book and look at all the different pages, so you’re able to look through small slices of the breast.”

What’s exciting about 3D mammography, Sedgwick sai,d is that the radiation level now, compared to when it first came out, is much less. With advanced techniques, radiation levels are similar to 2D mammogram radiation levels. “So, really, women are getting the benefit of all those little slices without any excess radiation,” she said, “and it only takes a few seconds longer than a 2D mammogram.”

3D mammography offers significant benefits over 2D, Sedgwick said. The cancer detection rate is higher than with 2D mammography, particularly in women with dense breast tissue. Nearly half of all women over 40 have dense breast tissue, according to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation – and women who have dense breasts have a higher risk of cancer. Dense breast tissue can mask a cancer, she said, because it shows up in imaging as the same color as the milk ducts or the alveoli – the tiny sacs where milk is created. 3D mammography can slice breast images so thinly that it more easily differentiates dense tissue from abnormal breast cells.

3D mammography also detects breast cancer earlier. Sedgwick says if you catch it when it is small, women have the option to have just that area removed rather than lose her whole breast.

“When breast cancer is caught in a very small size,” she said, “it is also less likely to have spread to the lymph nodes. That’s important for a couple of reasons. The first is you’re less likely to require chemotherapy if it’s localized to just the breast, for the most part. There are some subsets of breast cancers that would still be localized for chemotherapy, but for the most part you would be able to avoid chemotherapy and also any excessive radiation to the armpit.”

With 3D mammography, there are also fewer callbacks. Meaning, the number of times women get called back from their screening mammogram when an unclear image suggests the need for further screening.

The new breast center offers biopsies along with imaging, she said. “You don’t do women a service if you offer something and then say, ‘Oh, but we can’t biopsy it.’”

Sedgwick makes an additional point.

“This is an opportunity to take care of yourself,” she said. “If you don’t take care of yourself first, you can’t take care of anybody else. So, this is really doing something for yourself.”