The University of Louisville has won a $25,000 grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation to provide free mammograms to medically underserved women. UofL will use the funding to extend the services of the James Graham Brown Cancer Center’s Mobile Mammography Unit.

“We are pleased that this grant will bring mammography screening to more women in Metro Louisville and the surrounding region,” said Donald M. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., chief of UofL’s Division of Medical Oncology and Hematology and Brown Cancer Center director. “Along with our partners KentuckyOne Health and the Kentucky Cancer Program, UofL is committed to making it possible for all women to have the benefit of the earliest possible screening and detection of breast cancer via our Mobile Mammography Unit.”

For more than 20 years, the Mobile Mammography Unit has reached women at their place of business, church, school and community, providing screening mammograms – the common way to detect early stage breast cancer. When breast cancer is caught early, treatment is less invasive and survival rates are greater.

The Mobile Mammography Unit uses digital computer-aided detection to enhance the mammography image and flag abnormalities in the breast, assisting radiologists in detecting early breast cancer. This is the same advanced technology offered at the Brown Cancer Center’s Breast Care Center, the first center in Kentucky to receive accreditation from the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers.

The unit’s services have been provided by the Brown Cancer Center, a part of KentuckyOne Health, and the Kentucky Cancer Program at UofL, a state-funded initiative that promotes education, research and service programs to reduce the heavy burden of cancer in Kentucky.