Perfecting your mammography practice

Brian Casey
Oct 4, 2004

Dear AuntMinnie Member,

With National Mammography Day approaching on October 15, it's a good time for mammography facilities to take a look at their clinical and business practices to ensure they're providing the best possible service for women being screened for breast cancer.

AuntMinnie.com is here to help. This month we're running a series of articles in our Women's Imaging Digital Community on how breast imaging facilities can enhance their operations.

In today's featured article, by staff writer Shalmali Pal, we look at one of the most dreaded aspects of a mammography exam -- breast compression. Fear of compression is a major factor preventing women from returning for a screening exam, and the story includes tips from experienced mammography providers for making compression more tolerable for patients.

Another new article, by staff writer Erik L. Ridley, offers advice on how facilities can survive a Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA) inspection. The story details the types of MQSA deficiencies that inspectors typically look for, and offers advice on how to protest an inspector's finding if the facility feels it's in error.

You'll find both stories, as well as additional articles we'll be publishing in observance of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, in our Women's Imaging Digital Community, at womens.auntminnie.com.

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(A) Free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curve for DBT-DINO and DINOv2 (Meta AI) on the detection task. DINOv2 achieved higher sensitivity than DBT-DINO across most false-positive thresholds. (B) Detection rates of DBT-DINO and DINOv2 for lesions that were ultimately found to be benign (n = 70) and lesions that were found to be cancerous (n = 66). Error bars represent 95% CIs estimated via patient-level bootstrapping with 1000 repetitions. Both models showed similar detection rates for cancerous lesions, whereas DINOv2 detected more benign lesions than DBT-DINO. (C) Example bounding box predictions for DBT-DINO and DINOv2 on the detection test set. Each image is a single two-dimensional section from a three-dimensional digital breast tomosynthesis volume; the first column shows a mediolateral oblique view, and the second and third columns show craniocaudal views. Both models struggled to detect very small lesions, such as the 3-mm-diameter lesion shown in the first column. FP = false positive.
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Images in a 70-year-old asymptomatic woman with a prior excisional biopsy in the left breast yielding lobular carcinoma in situ 3 years earlier. Screening contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM) was performed, which was considered a prevalence screen as the woman had no prior breast MRI in the past 3 years and no prior CEM. (A) Low-energy (26–30 kVp) mediolateral oblique (MLO) and (B) craniocaudal (CC) views show surgical clips but no abnormality. (C) Recombined MLO and (D) CC images show an enhancing mass in the medial left breast (arrows). Biopsy revealed invasive lobular carcinoma. Size was 0.2 cm; tumor grade II/III; negative lymph nodes; and estrogen receptor–positive, progesterone receptor–positive, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–negative.
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