What Is Reading Mammography?

Mammography is used a lot for early detection and screening of breast cancer in past decades. However, reading mammography is a labor-intensive job for radiologists, who cannot always provide consistent results between readings. The Readings depend on training, experience, and subjective criteria. In fact, about ten percent of all malignant tumors in mammograms are missed by radiologists, and most of the missed tumors are in dense breasts. On the other hand, mammography causes a high false positive rate. Only about 525 of 1800 lesions sent to biopsy are malignant. The reasons for such high miss rate and low specificity of mammography are: (1) the low conspicuity of mammographic lesions ; (2) the noisy nature of the images; and (3) the overlying