Digital Toolkit for Digital Mammography Quality Control

Mammography is one of the most effective methods for early breast cancer detection. Digital mammography has been established as a relatively new modality in radiology. The lack of a suitable Quality cotrol phantom, requires a new design of phantom for digital mammography imaging systems. A new phantom was designed with a new set of embedded objects composed of materials that are readily available, inexpensive, stable over time and easily prepared in the desired configuration. In addition, automatic quantitative scoring of the phantom was also desired. Phantom films were first digitised and then the template matching algorithm was used to detect and score the visibility of the phantom objects. In all cases, the image processing algorithms have yielded scores that have been comparable to, but more consistent than, scores obtained by the human used as controls. The quantitative and qualitative of the phantom images at 12 hospitals reveal that the phantom fulfils its design criterion and has already proved to be a useful tool in the QC of the mammography Suitable for Technologist, Radiologist, Medical Physicist and Biomedical Engineers