Medical Imaging: Breast Imaging

A health care provider helps a patient with breast screening.

Breast imaging is located at St. Joseph's Hospital.

Depending on what test has been booked, you will be directed to arrive at either the: 

  • Norton and Lucille Wolf Breast Care Centre
  • Francis and Madeleine Saul Medical Imaging Centre
  • Nuclear Medicine/MRI department

What is breast screening?

Breast screening or a screening mammogram is a low-dose X-ray examination of a woman's breasts to detect breast cancer when that cancer is too small to be felt as a lump. Screening mammography is carried out on women who do not have any symptoms of breast disease.

Regular breast screening can find cancer when it is small, which means:

  • There is a better chance of treating the cancer successfully
  • It is less likely to spread
  • There may be more treatment options

Finding cancer early is important. Breast screening and better treatments are helping to reduce deaths from cancer.

St. Joseph’s Hospital provides breast imaging services for:

  • Breast screening: Imaging for women who have no apparent breast symptoms to detect early signs of breast cancer  
  • Breast assessment: For women or men with breast symptoms or a potential abnormality is to be investigated by breast imaging or other tests ​​​

Ontario Breast Screening Program

St. Joseph’s Hospital is an affiliate site of the Ontario Breast Screening Program (OBSP), providing routine screening mammograms to women age 50 and over or those age 30 and over with risk factors.

The OBSP is a program of Cancer Care Ontario. Women with or without a family physician can be screened through the OBSP at any of the 180+ locations in the province. (Please note, there are several OBSP sites in London). Our St. Joseph’s Hospital location option is in the Francis and Madeleine Saul Medical Imaging Centre of St. Joseph’s Hospital, Zone C, Level 0. 

For more information or booking, call 519-646-6105. 

Women can book their own appointments and are reminded by letter when they are due for their next screen.

Please note: The pandemic has caused unprecedented and unfortunate delays in access to routine breast screening at St. Joseph’s Hospital.  We understand that your screening appointment is important and we are booking as many appointments as possible as we work through a backlog of patients.  The current wait for routine breast screening is more than 6 months.

Working with our regional partners, some sites have additional capacity and you may choose those locations for your routine breast screening. They include:

St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital
519-631-2030 ext. 2517
Fax-519-631-8842

Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital
519-246-5200
Central Booking: 1-866-269-8384

Stratford General Hospital
519-272-8210 ext. 2339

Breast self-examination

All women should do a breast self-exam each month and visit their doctor for routine check-ups. For more free information or help on breast self-examination, please call your doctor or:

  • Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
    519 691-0969
    Outside London: call 1-866-373-6313
  • Canadian Cancer Society
    519 432-1137
    Outside London: call 1-800-268-8874
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