Cancer Screening Performance Improved With Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

TUESDAY, April 25, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has improved cancer screening performance compared with digital mammography (DM), according to a study published online April 11 in Radiology.

Christoph I. Lee, M.D., from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and colleagues established performance benchmarks for DBT screening in a retrospective study using DBT screening examinations collected from five Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) registries. Performance measures included abnormal interpretation rate (AIR), cancer detection rate (CDR), sensitivity, specificity, and false-negative rate (FNR), and were compared to concurrent BCSC DM screening examinations. Data were included for 896,101 women undergoing 2,301,766 screening examinations (458,175 DBT and 1,843,591 DM examinations).

The researchers found that the performance measures for DBT screening were as follows: AIR, 8.3 percent; CDR, 5.8 per 1,000 screens; sensitivity and specificity, 87.4 and 92.2 percent, respectively; and FNR, 0.8 per 1,000 screens. Except for sensitivity and FNR, which were similar, all performance measures were higher for DBT than for the same time period and previously published BCSC DM and National Mammography Database performance benchmarks. Overall, 97.6, 91.8, 75.0, and 74.0 percent of radiologists achieved acceptable performance ranges with DBT for CDR, sensitivity, AIR, and specificity.

"Radiologists appear to perform better with digital breast tomosynthesis and have higher accuracy on screening 3D mammograms than 2D mammograms across U.S. practices," Lee said in a statement. "As this becomes the mainstay screening modality, we hope to see improved screening outcomes for women."

One author disclosed textbook royalty payments.

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