Quality Control in Digital Mammography

Abstract

An effective quality control system for digital mammography needs to evaluate the status of each stage of image formation — acquisition, processing and display. Such quality control benefits greatly from the ability to make more precise and reproducible measurements than was possible with film-screen systems. On the other hand, the greater variety of system designs and general lack of experience with different digital systems has complicated the introduction of quality control (QC) procedures. Those with extensive experience of QC in digital mammography have stressed the importance of checking regularly for artifacts in images of uniform test blocks for the early detection of any problems arising in the image acquisition stage, e.g. the detector. Although the tests for the subsequent stages of image processing and display are less well developed, they are of considerable importance and will be the focus of further work. Digital technology makes possible the automation of routine QC procedures and a method of doing this is described.