Nov. 18, 2025
Wendie Berg: From Survivor to Advocate
When the world-renowned researcher, clinician and patient advocate faced her own breast cancer diagnosis, she was inspired to find an improved way to detect cancer for women with dense breast tissue and a family history of the disease.
TOPICS: People
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
Wendie Berg, Dr. Bernard F. Fisher Breast Cancer Research Professor, School of Medicine, is not only a personal survivor of breast cancer, but she’s also the daughter, niece and aunt of women who have faced the same diagnosis.
For her book on breast imaging, she wrote a chapter on risk models, methods that tally risk based on family history of breast and ovarian cancer, age, height, weight and other factors. Her own result came to a 19.7 perfect lifetime risk—just shy of the 20% mark that would recommend adding an MRI to routine mammograms.
Her mammogram and tomosynthesis (3D mammogram) a year earlier had been clear. Berg, however, has dense breast tissue that can make finding cancer more difficult. Knowing this and having led trials investigating supplemental ultrasound and MRI for that population, she opted for an MRI.
She promised herself she wouldn’t look—but she did anyway. She found a .9 centimeter tumor that the 2D and 3D mammograms had missed. It all turned out okay for Berg after a month of radiation.
But, the experience made her realize how little was known about cancer detection.
“My own well-educated, well-intentioned doctor wasn’t able to guide me,” Berg said to Pitt Med Magazine in 2016. “And, unfortunately, my experience is not unique.”
“By detecting cancers earlier, we're empowering women to begin treatment sooner—and ultimately, to save lives.”
Wendie Berg, Dr. Bernard F. Fisher Breast Cancer Research Professor
Her experience motivated both her research and passion for patient advocacy. Her work focuses on improving early detection of breast cancer, particularly in women with dense breast tissue and who may have a family history of breast cancer. She has conceived, designed and executed several major clinical imaging trials that compare various methods of breast cancer screening that have influenced not only other researchers but also breast cancer screening policies worldwide. Berg has also authored a leading textbook used to train radiology residents across the country and abroad and codeveloped a prominent educational website for women and health care providers regarding the masking effects and risks of dense breast tissue for options for supplemental screening.
Most recently, Berg has been studying the potential of contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM). CEM uses updated standard mammography equipment to obtain low-energy and high-energy images following an injection of an iodine-based contrast. Subtraction images are then created that depict enhanced findings like those of contrast-enhanced MRIs, and the low-energy images are comparable to standard digital mammograms. CEM has a detection rate like that of MRI screenings, but it has a far shorter examination time and makes it simpler to catch cancer earlier in patients with dense breast tissue.
So far, they’ve found that adding CEM to digital breast tomosynthesis, a 3D mammography technique, does significantly increase early cancer detection, proving that CEM can catch very small tumors.
“By detecting cancers earlier, we're empowering women to begin treatment sooner—and ultimately, to save lives,” Berg said.