An Investigation into the Consistency in Mammographic Density Identification by Radiologists: Effect of Radiologist Expertise and Mammographic Appearance

The aim of this work is to investigate how radiologist expertise and image appearance may have an impact on inter-reader variability of mammographic density (MD) identification. Seventeen radiologists, divided into three expertise groups, were asked to manually segment the areas they consider to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of digital imaging 2015-10, Vol.28 (5), p.626-632
Main Authors: Li, Yanpeng, Brennan, Patrick C., Lee, Warwick, Nickson, Carolyn, Pietrzyk, Mariusz W., Ryan, Elaine A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Borders
Breast Density
Breast Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging
Clinical Competence - statistics & numerical data
Consistency
Density
Digital imaging
Female
High density
Humans
Imaging
Mammary Glands, Human - abnormalities
Mammography - statistics & numerical data
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Observer Variation
Radiology
Reproducibility of Results
Segmentation
Segments
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Summary:The aim of this work is to investigate how radiologist expertise and image appearance may have an impact on inter-reader variability of mammographic density (MD) identification. Seventeen radiologists, divided into three expertise groups, were asked to manually segment the areas they consider to be MD in 40 clinical images. The variation in identification of MD for each image was quantified by finding the range of segmentation areas. The impact of radiologist expertise and image appearance on this variation was explored. The range of areas chosen by participating radiologists varied from 7 to 73 % across the 40 images, with a mean range of 35 ± 13 %. Participants with high expertise were more likely to choose similar areas to one another, compared to participants with medium and low expertise levels (mean range were 19 ± 10 %, 29 ± 13 % and 25 ± 14 %, respectively, p  
ISSN:0897-1889
1618-727X
DOI:10.1007/s10278-015-9814-4