Abstract
We performed a preliminary investigation to determine how similar radiologists’ interpretations of screening mammograms are. Our dataset consisted of 50 cancer cases and 50 normal cases that were read by 50 radiologists. We computed sensitivity, specificity, and interpretation on a case-by-case basis to study similarity between pairs of radiologists. We failed to find any pairs of radiologists who read all the cases, only the normal cases, or only the cancer cases the same. There were very few radiologists who read both cancer cases and normal cases in a similar manner. Even radiologists who had similar sensitivities or similar specificities differed substantially on the interpretation of individual cases. Our data indicate that there may be an underlying variability between radiologists in terms of image features used to detect cancers and when a false detection is made. This underlying variability may make the development and implementation of model observers more difficult.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReference
Beam, C.A., Layde, P.M., Sullivan, D.C.: Variability in the interpretation of screening mammograms by US radiologists. Findings from a national sample. Arch. Intern. Med. 156(2), 209–213 (1996)
Acknowledgments
The work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, grant R01EB013680.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nishikawa, R.M., Comstock, C.E., Linver, M.N., Newstead, G.M., Sandhir, V., Schmidt, R.A. (2016). Agreement Between Radiologists’ Interpretations of Screening Mammograms. In: Tingberg, A., Lång, K., Timberg, P. (eds) Breast Imaging. IWDM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9699. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41546-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41546-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41545-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41546-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)