"Did I understand that you cooked my breast with microwaves?" the woman angrily asked Dr. Norman Sadowsky, chief radiologist at Boston's Faulkner Hospital. Sadowsky reassured her that he had not. Yet her concern is typical of the initial response to the hospital's breast-cancer detection program. To help in the all-important early discovery of a disease that has reached epidemic levels in the U.S. (90,000 cases a year), Faulkner radiologists are using microwaves to spot breast cancers.
Microwaves, though they are being employed for everything from sending telephone messages to cooking steaks, would seem...