Selective digital enhancement of conventional film mammography

Abstract

Screening mammography continues to play a key role in the early diagnosis of non-palpable breast cancer. Approximately 5% of patients will have lesions on their mammograms that appear neither clearly benign nor malignant. The proper management of these patients is not well defined. In this study, the mammograms of 64 women who underwent breast biopsy were reviewed. After the initial review, the mammograms were reevaluated using a personal computer driven digital conversion and enhancement system. The majority of indeterminate lesions were assigned a determinate diagnosis by enhancing the areas of abnormality through enlargement, contrast adjustment, and brightness adjustment. The radiologists were able to maintain baseline sensitivity and specificity throughout this process. In contrast, enhancement of lesions initially assigned a diagnosis of characteristically benign or malignant demonstrated no advantage over plain film mammography. These findings suggest a role for the selective use of digital mammography and enhancement techniques.

Role of Wire‐guided Breast Biopsy for Diagnosis of Malignant Nonpalpable Mammographic Lesions

“…During the 4-year period of our study in the Soroka Medical Center nearly 9500 screening mammographies and 438 wire localization biopsies of the mammographic findings were performed. This incidence of 4.6% is comparable to that reported in other studies [10,12]. Solid masses represented the most common indication for biopsy (n ϭ 182, 41.6%), following by C in 144 cases (32.9%), and A in 78 patients (17.8%); MC and S were less common findings: 25 (5.7%) and 9 (2.1%), respectively (Table 1).…”

The effect of intensity windowing on the detection of simulated masses embedded in dense portions of digitized mammograms in a laboratory setting

“…8 Hale et al have applied nonspecific contrast and brightness adjustment through Adobe Photoshop (Adobe Systems Inc, Mountain View, CA) to digitized mammograms and have found improved performance by radiologists in determining the likelihood of malignancy of mammographically apparent lesions. 9 Yin et al showed that nonlinear bilateral subtraction is useful in the computerdetection of mammographic masses. ~0., Previous work at the University of North Carolina has explored the use of intensity windowing (IW) and the Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE) family of algorithms in mammography and computed tomography.…”

Evaluation of Digital Mammography Display

“…[12][13][14] We have previously described a laboratory-based method for testing the efficacy of an image processing algorithm in improving the detection of masses in dense mammographic backgrounds. 15 With that method, upon which our current work is based, radiologists and non-radiologists exhibit similar trends in detection performance.…”