I had a bad chest doctor sent me for xray first week in August which came back all clear. Four months later vascular surgeon saw a large mass on my lower lung. After many scans etc stage four cancer. Cannot be cured nor can anyone explain the first chest xray results. Any ideas?

Tumours have to be a certain size to be seen on any given scan. Some scans are better picking up certain tumours than others when they're smaller, but ALL scan require the tumour to be of a certain size.

There was actually a very good article, maybe last year, doing the rounds on the BBC news website. Via technology, they managed to make a mouse entirely transparent, and after doing so, picked up very small metastasized cancer cells when conventional scans etc couldn't. According to the normal scans when the mouse was in its natural state, it had no spread. But the deposits were spread here and there.

That aside, because cancer can be missed if it's too small or being obscured by something else, cancer can grow fast. A scan is a mere snapshot of one moment, not a rolling/fluid picture.

According to oncologist there was no plausible reason for this being missed the tumour covered the whole bottom quarter lobe. The really interesting thing was that xray technician had compared this xray with one I had done two years previously.

The tumour covered the whole bottom quarter of the right lung and according to the oncologist should have shown up on the xray. The xray technician stated that he compared this xray with one I had two years previously and all was the same and normal?