<title>Do subtle breast cancers attract visual attention during initial impression?</title>

Abstract

Women who undergo regular mammographic screening afford mammographers a unique opportunity to compare current mammograms with prior exams. This comparison greatly assists mammographers in detecting early breast cancer. A question that commonly arises when a cancer is detected under regular periodic screening conditions is whether the caner is new, or was it missed on the prior exam? This is a difficult question to answer by retrospective analysis, because knowledge of the status of the current exam biases the interpretation of the prior exam. To eliminate this bias and provide some degree of objectivity in studying this question, we looked at whether experienced mammographers who had no prior knowledge of a set of test cases fixated on potential cancer-containing regions on mammograms from cases penultimate to cancer detection. The results show that experienced mammographers cannot recognize most malignant cancers selected by retrospective analysis.