Towards digital mammography
Statistics show that breast cancer is one of the key causes of death among women between 35 and 50 years. Particularly in the EU, every two-and-a-half minutes, a new incident is reported and every six-and-a-half minutes a woman dies due to breast cancer. In order to reduce such mortality rates, early detection of the disease is required and thereby most Western countries have adopted mammography-screening programs. Due to the employment of mammography screening in women on a regular basis, a reduction in death from cancer of about 30% has been shown. Current mammography screening is normally film-based and for this reason it presents many disadvantages such as, the low image quality displayed makes the films interpretation a very time-consuming task. Additionally, the regular screening requires the use of a substantial number of films, which renders these means very expensive along with their related costly processing procedures involved. Alternatively, the emerging digital mammography technologies have the potential to further increase the efficiency and effectiveness of breast cancer screening. However, the transition from film-based to digital mammography requires a suitable soft-copy reading environment for handling images. Addressing this need, the Soft-Copy REading ENvironment (SCREEN) project resulted in developing a prototype high-volume soft-copy reading (SCR) system to replace film-based reading in screening. The computer-aided detection may detect lesions and other abnormalities more effectively, particularly identification of calcifications, which might be the only visible sign of a cancer. The system is capable of storing large amounts of data - each digital mammography image is of an order of 60MB comprising of 4800x6000 pixels leading to 0.25GB of image data per woman. Exploiting soft-copy reading and computer-aided detection technology, the radiologist may be able to screen more than 150 women in an hour and with the aid of a computer assisted training system, automatic warnings are provided in case of human errors. Apart from hospitals and clinics, breast care centres and private practitioners who are specialised in mammography, the system may well be exploited by manufacturers of digital mammography equipment or of other high-quality high-resolution display systems used in medicine, aviation and military.
