Acceptance Testing and Quality Control of Digital Mammography Equipment

Abstract

Digital mammographic systems are being introduced by a number of manufacturers, and will soon be entering the market. Clinical evaluations of equipment from three commercial manufacturers are being performed by our consortium (International Digital Mammography Development Group(IDMDG)). Each manufacturer’s approach to digital mammography has inherent trade-offs which may reduce image quality, or introduce artefacts and/or inconsistencies in the image. As with conventional film-screen mammography, it is imperative that a quality control program be instituted to ensure maximum achievable image quality. The tests which are performed on these units should be both comprehensive and rational; efficient to perform, yet designed to detect problems and changes in the characteristics of a digital mammographic unit, before there is any impact on clinical image quality. Because there are a number of significantly different implementations of digital mammography, the testing regimen must be capable of finding problems related to the physics of image formation (kVp, filtration, DQE), electronic function (dark noise, cross-talk, RC time constants, A/D saturation, non-linearity), as well as software problems (flat fielding, warping algorithms, round-off error).