Parliamentary Secretary for Health Chris Fearne at yesterday’s press conference. Photo: Paul Spiteri Lucas

The National Health Screening Services will be making use of new, innovative software which will calculate a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer with the aim of slashing the death rate of the disease.

Some 350 women each year are diagnosed with breast cancer, 80 cases of which are fatal, Health Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne said yesterday.

While breast cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, the good news is patients have a survival rate of 95 per cent if detected early.

The software will complement the existing breast screening service, offered for free every three years for women aged between 50 and 60.

So far, Mr Fearne said, breast cancer was identified in its initial stages in 230 women thanks to screening. Some 14,000 mammograms are performed per year.

The sophisticated, web-based system draws up a family tree for women, profiling lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors, such as a family history of breast cancer.

Algorithms are then extracted from the data, which serve to identify a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer – whether it is low, medium or high.

The system also issues scientific recommendations based on guidelines by the UK’s National Insititute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

The results are then referred to a team of experts, including geneticists and consultants. High-risk individuals are offered genetic testing for the hereditary genetic mutations BRCA1 and BRCA2 as well as counselling.

Initially, the service will be focused on women invited for free breast screening. Eventually, it will be extended to other cohorts, including patients referred by their GPs.

This will complement the existing free breast screening service offered to women

The Imagenx (Italia Malta Genome Breast Cancer Cross Border Risk Surveillance) project is a €2.5 million EU co-funded project between Italy and Malta.

The project was born in 2013, when a group of health experts from Malta’s National Screening Services, academics from the University of Malta and the Malta Council for Science and Technology set about seeking EU funding for a project on assessing the risk of breast cancer.

They were soon joined by three other health units from Sicily.

Apart from the desktop software, the group also developed mobile phone applications for family tree evaluations which will be launched shortly.

All web based software was created in Malta by Maltese IT experts.