Dr. Maureen Burke is on the trail of a serial killer. She sits in a dark room with a magnifying glass to her eye, her face pressed against a screen. She might be a Sherlock Holmes understudy, but in fact she is a radiologist at TB Cancer & Health. Her job is to find minute traces of breast cancer, a silent stalker that attacks 40 to 50 local women, annually.

TB Cancer & Health on Point Finger Road, conducts 70 percent of the mammograms on the Island ? about 40 mammograms a day and 800 a month. A few weeks ago the organisation installed a new weapon to carry on the fight against breast cancer more effectively, a machine called a Crystal Viewer.

The machine looks like a large light box. Mammography films run through it. Bright light behind it can be adjusted to better enhance the mammogram films. This is particularly effective with the overhead lights in the room turned down low or extinguished entirely. A row of previous mammograms can be run across the top while newer films are run across the bottom. It allows the radiologist to be able to look at a range of films, simultaneously.

"It is very efficient because you are not shuffling film as you are trying to record everything. It is there and ready to be interpreted," said Dr. Burke.

"This crystal viewer is important because there are a lot of patients who need mammograms, and if we are going to serve them in the best possible manner then we need to be as efficient as possible."

The machine not only improves viewing conditions, but also the quality of diagnosis.

"If the breast has cancer, sometimes you see a nodule or a mass, in other instances you might see some distortion of the normal architecture of the breast," said Dr. Burke. "Other signs of cancer might show up as micro-calcification.

"We look for that with a magnifying glass. Patients' survival correlates directly with the size of the lesion at diagnosis. With mammograms we are trying to pick up tiny cancer at a stage where they are curable."

Dr. Burke said it was easy to learn how to use the new machine.

"The machine itself is very intuitive," she said. "To my knowledge, this is the first time a machine like this is used in Bermuda."

King Edward VII Memorial Hospital has a similar machine called a flexi-viewer, but it is for looking at a variety of different films. The Crystal Viewer at TB Cancer & Health is thought to be the only one on the island designed exclusively to look at mammogram films.

The hospital has something similar, but it is a different type called a flexi-viewer. It is used for different kinds of films, not just for detecting cancers.

Dr. Burke is originally from Montreal, Quebec, Canada and has been on the Island for four years. Interest in radiology runs in her family. Her father was an x-ray technician.

"It is a fascinating field," said Dr. Burke. "The field has evolved tremendously in the last 20 years. It is technology dependent."

Rachael Andrade, education officer at TB Cancer & Health said, "The Crystal Viewer is the gold standard of technology. It is not that mammograms don't precisely identify things, but it enhances a lot more during the reading the mammogram."