Digital Mammography

Abstract

The prognosis for patients with breast cancer is closely related to the size and stage of the lesion at the time of diagnosis. For this reason, any technological improvement that holds promise to detect breast cancers of smaller size and at an earlier stage must be closely scrutinized. Despite improvements in ultrasound and contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging of the breast, x-ray mammography maintains its role as the method of choice to screen asymptomatic women to detect early-stage breast cancer (Feig 1994; Vogel 1994). The effectiveness of mammography in detecting early disease correlates closely with the image quality achieved with the specific system. Digital systems intended for mammography must thus equal the quality requirements established for conventional film-screen systems and offer significant advantages that alleviate existing shortcomings. The rapid retrieval of archived images in a digital picture archival and communications system (PACS) could be one of these improvements. The most important potential advantage, however, promises to be the implementation of computer-assisted detection (CAD) algorithms which are specifically intended for a screening situation. It is the continuous improvement of CAD techniques for mammography screening that has increased interest in digital mammography more than a decade after the first commercial systems became available (Sonoda et al. 1983).