Physical measures of image quality in mammography

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Abstract
A recently introduced method for quantitative analysis of images of the American College of Radiology (ACR) mammography accreditation phantom has been extended to include signal- to-noise-ratio (SNR) measurements, and has been applied to survey the image quality of 54 mammography machines from 17 hospitals. Participants sent us phantom images to be evaluated for each mammography machine at their hospital. Each phantom was loaned to us for obtaining images of the wax insert plate on a reference machine at our institution. The images were digitized and analyzed to yield indices that quantified the image quality of the machines precisely. We have developed methods for normalizing for the variation of the individual speck sizes between different ACR phantoms, for the variation of the speck sizes within a microcalcification group, and for variations in overall speeds of the mammography systems. In terms of the microcalcification SNR, the variability of the x-ray machines was 40.5% when no allowance was made for phantom or mAs variations. This dropped to 17.1% when phantom variability was accounted for, and to 12.7% when mAs variability was also allowed for. Our work shows the feasibility of practical, low-cost, objective and accurate evaluations, as a useful adjunct to the present ACR method.

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