Evaluating Digital Radiology Imaging Requirements By Diagnostic Reporting
Morris Goldberg, JOHN G. ROBERTSON, G. Bélanger · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1988
There have been numerous studies of the the spatial and contrast requirements for digital radiology. In our application we are particularly interested in the overall system performance of an image workstation. As the transcribed report of the radiologist's findings is in most cases the "final product" used by the referring physician, it seems natural to base the performance measure upon the clinical value of this report. Twenty four cases from the teaching files and for which the pathologies had been verified by other means were used in the test. The films were digitized by Dr H.K. Huang of UCLA using their Konica laser-based scanner, and then displayed to the equivalent of 1000 lines of resolution for a 14-by-17 film with to 8 bits of contrast resolution. Five radiologist reported their findings by reading the analog and the digital series of films. For each report a disease vector was calculated which takes into account the disease found and the radiologist's confidence. A disease vector length is then calculated which summarizes in one value the quality of the report. Overall we find that the analog series outperforms the digital series by a small margin.