Differences in radiologists' experiences and performance in breast tomosynthesis

Abstract

The purpose was to study the ability of radiologists to detect breast cancers using 1-view breast tomosynthesis (BT) compared to 2-view digital mammography (DM) correlated with their experience in mammography. The patient population was enriched with difficult cases (89 abnormal and 96 normal/benign breasts). Eight breast radiologists with various experience levels in mammography interpreted the BT and DM image sets individually in a FROC study. Their performance was measured by the JAFROC figure-of-merit ( (non-parametric area under the AFROC curve) and analyzed as a function of experience level. The improvement was significant for the highly experienced radiologists, mean (θ BT-DM = 0.092; 95% CI: [0.023, 0.161] and for the experienced radiologists, mean (θ BT-DM = 0.094; 95% CI: [0.034, 0.149] while it was not for the less experienced radiologists, mean (θ BT-DM = 0.021: 95% CI: [-0.161, 0.202]. The results indicate that experience is necessary to achieve optimal performance in BT. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.