For Etta Pisano, work is personal. Her mother passed away from breast cancer when Pisano was only 15.
Now a professor and director of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Pisano has devoted her career to breast cancer research.
"She died very quickly," Pisano says of her mother. "I was the oldest of seven. It was hard for
our family to be without a mother. I decided at that point that I wanted to use my brain to help other families avoid the same thing."
She initially wanted to work in women's health as an obstetrician-gynecologist, but Pisano said she quickly realized the job wasn't for her. "I just don't have a brain that functions after midnight, and a lot of babies are born after midnight," she says with a laugh.
Instead, Pisano, who graduated from the Duke School of Medicine in 1983, went into radiology. She is now making headlines for her inspirational and groundbreaking work in digital breast imaging.
Pisano led a four-year study, published last October, of nearly 50,000 women that compared digital mammography to the more widely used film form. The study, called the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial, is the largest of its kind to date.
Research from the study showed that digital mammography was more effective for women with dense breasts. It was also more effective for women under 50 and pre- and perimenopausal women.
Overall, 65 percent of the trial participants would have benefited from digital mammography because they fell into one of these three groups.
Although Pisano and her colleagues first conceived of the study in 1997, they faced some lackluster response from members of the medical community and didn't receive funding until 2001. "It's been a long time coming," she says. "It was inspired because we aren't saving enough women's lives."
Since the study was publishedPisano's schedule has ballooned to include interviews, television appearances and photos shoots. On top of her usual duties as professor, doctor and researcher, Pisano has become a media darling.
"The hubbub around it was quite amazing," she says. "People I knew from around the world saw me on TV, and I was bombarded with e-mails.... I was interviewed by about 50 media outlets, maybe more. Now I've lost count."
Pisano is hoping digital mammography will replace film soon, but as of yet, she says no major medical organization has recommended switching technologies.
Nonetheless, some hospitals may be taking steps based on Pisano's research.
"I've heard, and there's no real way to tell this, I've heard that there are more [digital] machines being sold than before," she says.
Even with the whirlwind activity surrounding her work, Pisano says her life outside the lab has changed very little. The mother of four is married to another Duke medical school graduate, and she says she likes to "hang out" with her family and go walking in the Duke Gardens.
"My life is very full," she says.
But Pisano is still driven to help women, and she says she plans to investigate improving more medical technologies, like MRIs and ultrasounds, in the coming years-making disease testing better, faster and cheaper.
"40,000 women die of breast cancer every year," Pisano says. "We need to make that number closer to zero.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.