ABOUT DART BOARD

Dr. Daniel Kopans is an honor graduate from Harvard College (1969) and an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate of the Harvard Medical School (1973).  After a medical internship at the Dartmouth Medical School’s, Mary Hitchcock Clinic, he returned to Harvard where he did his residency in Diagnostic Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) which he completed in 1977.  Dr. Kopans was Board Certified in Diagnostic Radiology in the same year.

Joining the staff of the MGH in 1977 Dr. Kopans was appointed as Head of what was then called the “Xeroradiography” Division.  The Xeroradiographic technique was used to image soft tissues.  At the time the Division provided breast evaluation for approximately 8 women each day.  Over the decades he ultimately grew the service to providing care for over 35,000 women each year.

Applying techniques other than just mammography for evaluating the breast, such as ultrasound and computed tomography, Dr. Kopans renamed his Division – “The Breast Imaging Division”.  His was the first “Breast Imaging Division” and this is the origin of the name that has been adopted by the specialty within Radiology which is now called “Breast Imaging”.  

Dr. Kopans was one of the “progenitors” of the field of “Breast Imaging”.   He has received numerous awards and honors including the gold medal from the Society of Breast Imaging, which is its highest honor.  

Dr. Kopans defined the field of Breast Imaging with a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1984 recognizing the value of multimodality breast evaluation.  With more than 250 publications he is also the single author of the leading textbook in the field entitled “Breast Imaging” now in its third edition.  Dr. Kopans played a major, fundamental and continuing role in developing Breast Imaging as a specialty.

He invented a guidewire and the techniques that made it possible to accurately direct surgeons to areas of concern found by mammography making it possible to aggressively pursue small lesions with a minimum of trauma to the patient using local anesthesia in an outpatient setting with a high degree of safety and accuracy.  Accurate localization and early intervention facilitated the diagnosis of very small cancers that led to the major decrease in breast cancer deaths that has been seen in the United States since 1990.

Dr. Kopans was co-chairman of the original American College of Radiology’s BIRADS committee.  The organized approach to image interpretation and reporting that he developed at the MGH is the basis for the American College of Radiology’s Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BIRADS).

Dr. Kopans is the leading expert on breast cancer screening for women in their forties and it was in large part due to his efforts in defining the scientific issues, analyzing the data, and pressuring the National Cancer Institute in the 1990's, that women ages 40-49 have access to routine annual mammography screening.  He continues to support the fundamental scientific basis of screening while exposing the flawed analyses that are being generated to try to reduce access to screening.

Dr. Kopans holds several patents on devices to improve breast cancer detection and diagnosis.  Among these, he is the inventor and patent holder for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT), sometimes called 3D mammography.  DBT permits high resolution tomographic breast evaluation that has been shown to significantly increase the detection of small cancers while also reducing the recall (false positive) rate. 

Dr. Kopans is a clinician, educator, investigator, author, and inventor.  He is a member and Fellow of the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the Breast Imaging Commission and is past Chairman of the Fellows Committee of the Society of Breast Imaging.