Performance Evaluation of a Digital Reading Station for Screening Mammography

In this paper the use of a soft-copy reading station for screening mammography is investigated and results are compared with analog reading. In the analog part of the study prior mammograms of 183 normal and 88 cancer cases selected from the Dutch breast cancer screening program were used. Only positive cases where the abnormality was visible on the prior screening mammogram were included. The prior mammograms were digitized and reread about 1.5 years after their first reading, on a dedicated screening workstation. All mammograms were processed by a CAD system. Unsharp masking was applied to the images to compensate for image degradation during digitization and display. Five experienced screening radiologists participated in the study. Performance was evaluated by ROC analysis and determination of reading speed. Soft-copy screening performance was found to be as good as conventional reading, both in terms of detection and reading speed.