Automated and human determination of threshold contrast for digital mammography systems

Abstract

European Guidelines for quality control in digital mammography specify minimum and achievable standards of image quality in terms of threshold contrast, based on readings of images of the CDMAM test object by human observers. However this is time-consuming and has large inter-observer error. To overcome these problems a software program (CDCOM) is available to automatically read CDMAM images and can be used to predict the threshold contrast for a typical observer. The results of threshold contrast determination by a panel of 3 human observers was compared in this study to predicted human readings for different types of digital mammography system to determine whether this provides a viable method of automated quality control and comparison with existing European Guidelines. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.