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Photos courtesy The Mozart Mission Facebook
By Erika Rolling
MOZART Mission

Breast cancer scanning system arrives at Grande Prairie Regional Hospital

Jun 30, 2023 | 6:00 AM

A piece of cutting-edge technology for breast cancer surgeries has a new home in the Grande Prairie Regional Hospital after huge community support raised over $275,000 for the machine in under six months.

The MOZART Mission made up of a large group of Grande Prairie and area members that have personally been touched by breast cancer, led the cause to get the MOZART 3D System.

The surgical system is used during breast cancer surgeries to clear margins of tissue as small as millimeter slices to detect cancer for immediate results, eliminating the need to send the tissue to pathology and reducing the number of surgeries to be performed if cancerous tissue is missed.

Alison Bergsma with the MOZART Mission says there are similar machines in Edmonton and she saw the need for one in the region.

“So many outlying communities are affected and they come to Grande Prairie, so we had put the idea out to our breast cancer group and everybody was on board and it just kinda took off from there.”

She notes there were countless supporters of the MOZART Mission from their inception; including personal and corporate donations, as well as from the City and County of Grande Prairie, MD of Greenview, lemonade stand fundraisers, bottle drives, and their MOZART Mixer.

Bergsma says so much money was raised in a short amount of time that there are extra funds. The group is rallying to get Alberta Health Services to approve a trial with a breast cancer marker system called The Molli.

“We made a promise to keep the money local and also to keep it for breast cancer… and so The Molli system is a wire-free soft tissue localization technology, so it marks the lesion before the surgery instead of using the traditional guide wire.”

“It would be more comfortable for the patient. They can place it earlier up to 30 days and so we are looking to trial it to see if it’s something our surgeons want to go ahead with,” Bergsma says The Molli is a seed type placement to mark the cancerous tissue, which is less invasive than a guide wire poking out of the body.

She adds The Molli would be a great addition to the MOZART 3D System which arrived in Grande Prairie near the end of June.

by Erika Rolling