August 23, 2007 — Hologic Inc. announced the publication of the first large scale study comparing the results of a particular digital mammography technology to women screened with film.
The Vestfold County Study by E. Vigeland, H. Klaasen, T.A. Klingen, S. Hofvind and P. Skaane was published in the on line version of European Radiology in August 2007.
The researchers compared cancer detection and recall rates of 18,239 women screened with a Hologic Selenia digital mammography system to the results of 324,763 women screened with film over a two year period.
While prior studies have compared the performance of digital mammography to screen-film in high volume screening, until this study no researchers had looked at the performance of a specific digital mammography technology. The detector characteristics and way the various digital mammography systems operate is considerably different.
The pixel size of the system studied, the Hologic Selenia system, is smaller, the system uses direct capture (selenium) technology, and the image-processing algorithms are unique, resulting in a sharp, high contrast image.
The researchers reported that the detection rate for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and the positive predictive value for cancer (PPV) were statistically significantly higher and the technical recall rate was statistically lower for Selenia over film.
For more information: www.hologic.com