Preliminary findings reported from hard-copy versus soft-copy mammography study.

2003 JAN 2 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Vidar Systems Corp., the leading manufacturer of medical film digitizers, announced a mammography clinical study being conducted at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution comparing radiologists' accuracy in reading the original hard-copy film versus digitized film on soft-copy.

The study utilized a Vidar Diagnostic PRO plus film digitizer and a MammoCAD research workstation provided by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which also includes viewing software by ImageSmiths. Four board certified radiologists each interpreted 60 mammography examinations, 30 as original films and the other half as digitized images.

Each examination was read independently four times, twice on film and twice as "soft-copy," resulting in a total of 120 diagnostic reports in each viewing mode. This study design provided for the "pairing" of readers' reports to compare the clinically significant findings noted for each examination in each mode. According to Joseph Gitlin, DPH, associate professor in the department of radiology at Johns Hopkins, and principal investigator of the study, "This design has been used successfully in several previous studies of digitized film readings compared to original film interpretations."

While the analysis of study data is not complete, ...