UC Davis

The purpose of this project was to enhance breast cancer screening by identifying the factors that impact it. Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women, and American women have a 12.3% risk of contracting it at some point in their life. Although screening has proven to be successful, controversies surrounding breast cancer screening programs remain. The screening start age, end age and frequency are subjects of the debate. This project aimed to address these controversies by developing a computer simulation of breast cancer screening. The simulation used rejection sampling to generate a cohort of 1 million women with 5 main attributes which are 1) age in the year 2016, 2) race, 3) age of death from non-breast cancer causes, 4) age at which the breast cancer was contracted, and 5) the growth rate of breast cancer. We then examined the generated cohort with different screening procedures. The study focused on mammography and breast CT screening modalities. To determine the most efficient breast cancer screening protocol several parameters were of interest. One of these parameters was years of life saved per number of tests performed. We concluded that screening every 2 years with CT starting at age 50 until 80 has the highest years of life saved per number of screenings for the entire population. The study also suggests that races benefit differently from each screening program, which should be taken into account for screening policies.