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Arlene Sussman, MD |
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Expert physician services in Digital
Mammography, Breast Sonography, Breast MRI, Stereotactic and Ultrasound Guided Biopsy and now - Telemammography. |
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Welcome. I am so glad you found me.
You may know me from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Suffolk Division where I served as the Director of the Department
of Radiology for the past 5 years. Perhaps you remember me from Winthrop University Hospital where I served as Director
of Women's Imaging or maybe you knew me when I first started practicing over 15 years ago at Good Sam Hospital. Maybe you don't yet know me. Allow me to tell you a little something about myself. Born and raised on Long Island, I attended medical school at Cornell University and after becoming a board certified radiologist, I finished my training with a fellowship subspecialty degree in breast imaging and intervention at New York University Hospital. I have spent the past 15 years or so honing my skills and spent most of my time performing clinical work including mammography, breast sonography, breast MRI, as well as perfecting non-surgical interventional procedures (breast biopsy work) to arrive at a diagnosis. Those patients who know me will tell you that I follow one very basic belief: I care what happens to you. What's New: For about two years now I have thinking about the way we deliver medical care to women and how to improve upon it. Traditionally, doctors have opened private practices and spent their lives caring for those in their immediate community. The face of medicine is rapidly changing, some of it in good and positive ways. For example, the progress made in breast cancer research has, for the first time in its history, caused the mortality or death rate from this disease to decline in the United States. We are certainly doing something right! Medicine, and in particular, radiology has become an extremely technical field.
Within radiology, breast imaging has finally caught up with the rest of the specialty, in that, now we are able to see images of the breast, i.e. mammograms, on a computer screen instead of developing pieces of film. The images, in other words, are now in digital format, allowing us more rapid diagnosis and the ability to archive and transmit images over long distances and in rapid time. Digital mammography, as it is called, also allows the doctor to manipulate the image by computer instead of making the patient repeat or undergo extra images. In other words, if I see an abnormality on the digital image I am able to enhance that particular spot with the computer so I can see the area better. This is all good news for you, the patient. Fewer images also means less radiation to you. We have also advanced the field of breast imaging to now include breast MRI, a valuable diagnostic tool for many women. MRI is also in digital format, allowing me to analyze the images, store them, and transmit them over computer lines.
For women in my local
community (New York) not much will change in how I can care for you. But for women who live in more remote areas of the country
where mammography centers and specialists are rare commodities, this will have a great impact on their well- being. Since
mammography is now digital, I am able to reach out of my immediate community and into more remote areas to provide expert
care to women who have thus far not had this advantage. I have recently joined an amazing company that can do everything
I have just talked about. I have joined on as the Director of Breast Imaging and the company is called Virtual Radiologic
(vRad). Please feel free to visit their website to get further acquainted with their services.
You can find them at virtualrad.com. vRad has taken the idea of “remote” imaging to great new heights. It built, from
the ground up, the technology behind acquiring, storing, sending, and reading radiology studies across the entire United States.
It provides services to 20+% of the hospitals in this country and has now taken on the challenge, with my help, of applying
this wonderful technology to breast imaging on a national scale. It was extremely important to me to find a way to reach
out to women who have limited access to care. With vRad, I am now able to read mammograms that are performed anywhere in the
country from my home base here in New York. The field, as we will develop it, is called Telemammography.
We will also continue to find novel ways of using the technology at hand to our advantage. For example, imagine that I read
a mammogram for a woman who lives in Nevada and there is an abnormality for which extra pictures and a repeat visit to the
office is required. I can immediately communicate what needs to be done in Nevada via computer, read the additional pictures
done in real time, and perhaps with video/skypes, am able to then talk to the woman in Nevada thru the computer. This woman
in Nevada, who previously had no access to a breast specialist, can now converse with me about her results and get all of
her questions answered directly by me. This
is a big leap forward for breast imaging as a field and more importantly as a means for providing expert care to all women
regardless of where they live. I am still performing clinical work at Brookhaven Women’s Center and can still
be contacted thru this website and email at md@arlenesussman.com
Dr. Arlene Sussman
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