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SASKATOON (CP) - A University of Saskatchewan research team working with colleagues in Toronto and Montreal has developed a way to take some of the "squeeze" out of mammograms while making them cheaper and more effective in detecting breast cancer.

Safa Kasap, an electrical engineering professor, and his graduate students have developed a photoconductor, a semiconductor alloy, that generates an electrical charge when exposed to X-rays.

It is the key component in a new X-ray image detector for mammography being developed by Anrad Corp. in Montreal. With this technology, an X-ray is passed through the breast tissue to the photoconductor where it is instantly converted to an electronic signal that produces a digital image on a computer screen. "You capture the image almost like a digital camera," explained Kasap. "There's no chemical development. It's the difference between, if you like, your normal film-based camera and a video camera." Kasap said it's possible future detectors will have higher resolution, allowing the image to be seen more clearly and thus allowing breast cancer to be detected earlier.

As well, mammograms could become less painful, because the breast no longer needs to be compressed as much as in traditional X-ray imaging, Kasap added. "There still is some compression," he said. "It's impossible to escape that." Kasap said Brad Polischuk, who graduated from the Saskatoon university with a PhD in 1993, was one of the key developers of the project and is now Anrad's Vice-President of Research.

The original idea for the detector came from John Rowlands of Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre at the University of Toronto, one of the research coalition partners. The detector is currently in the last stage of clinical trials, and could hit commercial markets next year. "They have to test so many women and then they have to show it's as good as the present system or better," Kasap said. "It probably will get better and better, obviously. This is just the initial prototype."