A randomised trial of screening with digital breast tomosynthesis plus conventional digital 2D mammography versus 2D mammography alone in younger higher risk women.

Introduction: Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has been shown to increase invasive cancer detection rates at screening compared to full field digital (2D) mammography alone, and some studies have reported a reduction in the screening recall rate. No prospective randomised studies of DBT have previously been published. This study compares recall rates with 2D mammography with and without concurrent DBT in women in their forties with a family history of breast cancer undergoing incident screening.

Preliminary validation of a new variable pattern for daily quality assurance of medical image display devices.

This paper reports on a comparative study between the well-established test patterns for daily quality assurance (QA) of monitors of the American Association of Medical Physicists, Task Group 18 (AAPMtg18) and the Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V (DIN), and a newly proposed variable test pattern. A characteristic of the test patterns currently used for the QA of monitors is their static nature: The same test pattern is always used.

Preliminary reference levels in interventional cardiology.

This article describes the European DIMOND approach to defining reference levels (RLs) for radiation doses delivered to patients during two types of invasive cardiology procedures, namely coronary angiography (CA) and percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA). Representative centres of six European countries recorded patients' doses in terms of dose-area product (DAP), fluoroscopy time and number of radiographic exposures, using X-ray equipment that has been subject to constancy testing. In addition, a DAP trigger level for cardiac procedures which should alert the operator to possible skin injury, was set to 300 Gyxcm2.