CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 3, 2009 /PRNewswire/ -- Raytheon BBN Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN), has licensed its patented, award-winning stereo digital mammography (SDM) technology to FUJIFILM Corp.

FUJIFILM intends to interface the SDM technology with the Aspire HD FFDM system. Combined with SDM technology, the Aspire HD digital mammography system will deliver stereo images for 3-D viewing. FUJIFILM will display the Raytheon BBN Technologies clinical evaluation results at the 2009 Radiological Society of North America annual meeting.

With Raytheon BBN Technologies SDM technology, a radiologist sees the entire breast, providing a direct, intuitive and in-depth, 3-D view of the internal structure, as opposed to current standard methods, which provide only 2-D image slices.

In a 2007 clinical trial at Emory University's Breast Imaging Center in Atlanta, Raytheon BBN Technologies SDM technology showed dramatic improvements in both early detection of suspicious lesions and reductions in false-positive readings compared to standard 2-D mammography. The trial results demonstrated that the SDM technology improves detection of suspicious lesions by more than 20 percent while reducing unnecessary patient recall by almost half.

"SDM is a promising new technology in the fight against breast cancer," said Dr. David Getty, lead scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies and developer of the SDM system. "The added information provided with SDM has the potential to reduce the number of women who are needlessly called back for further work-up by almost half."

"Stereo digital mammography is an important new tool that could lead to better outcomes for the millions of women who confront a breast cancer diagnosis every year," said Richard Upton, executive vice president, Raytheon BBN Technologies.

Raytheon BBN Technologies was formed when Raytheon purchased BBN Technologies in November 2009. Raytheon BBN Technologies is a research and development organization with expertise spanning speech and language processing, privacy and security systems, networking, data mining, distributed systems, and surveillance systems. Almost 50 years ago, Raytheon BBN Technologies built one of the first hospital information systems, automating the collection and retrieval of patient data. Under grants from the National Institutes of Health, Raytheon BBN Technologies developed GenBank, a continually updated international database of nucleic acid sequences and the widely-used Prophet System to enhance biomedical research. Raytheon BBN Technologies' Healthcare Informatics group is now transforming clinical information into actionable insights.

Raytheon Company, with 2008 sales of $23.2 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 87 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as a broad range of mission support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 73,000 people worldwide.

Note to Editors:

The Aspire HD is known as the AMULET outside the U.S. The Aspire HD requires FDA approval and is not yet available for sale in the U.S.

Joyce Kuzmin                 Mark Gauthier
Raytheon BBN Technologies    Raytheon BBN Technologies
617.872.3389                 978.325.7048
jkuzmin@bbn.com              mgauthier@bbn.com

SOURCE: Raytheon Company

Web site: http://www.bbn.com/

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