> Secondary benefits of detecting early are needing less extensive surgery, less intensive chemotherapy and radiation, less expensive next generation therapies in the long run.

This is true, but you have to not have too many false positives.

A friend of mine went to get her mammogram, and it saw "something". She was a mess until the biopsy came back negative. "Mess" meaning high blood pressure, palpitations, etc.--that false positive could very well have killed her with a cardiac event. A screening test like this that has even worse false positives will kill some people like her.

Another one has always had negative mammograms and extensive 3D imaging. Suddenly, her breast blew up to twice its size. Everyone assumed it was a localized infection because she just had a negative mammogram set less than 30 days earlier. The only reason they bothered to order a biopsy was to try to break whatever lymph clog was causing her "edema". Oops--Stage 3 invasive lobular breast cancer throughout the entire breast.

You can't see lobular breast cancers on mammograms because they never form a lump, they just inflitrate all throughout the normal cells. They're about 30% of all breast cancers and a screening test that can flag these (even with a false positive) would be a godsend. Being able to flag people for a followup MRI would be a significant improvement if it doesn't have too many false positives. A screening test like this would be quite beneficial.

As always in medicine, things are complicated.