The Bavarian mammography recertification programme: experiences with a workstation prototype for softcopy reading

摘要

In January 2002, the Bavarian Statutory Health Care Administration ("Kassenarztliche Vereinigung Bayerns", KVB) started a recertification programme for quality assurance and quality improvement in mammography reading. All accredited radiologists and gynaecologists are asked to prove their qualification every 1-2 years. The recertification programme requires the physicians to read 50 cases randomly selected from a larger collection of high-quality test cases. The portion of malignant and benign cases corresponds to the requirements of the German National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians ("Kassenarztliche Bundesvereinigung", KBV). In order to read the mammograms on a softcopy device the images are digitised with a high-quality scanner and converted to DICOM Digital Mammography format. The workstation software has been implemented according to the particular requirements of this programme. To verify the applicability of digitised mammograms for recertification purposes, a comparative study with 32 trained radiologists and gynaecologists has been performed. As a result the study showed that there was no significant difference in the error rate of the reported findings between conventional film and softcopy reading. The first intermediate results of this quality initiative are promising. The introduction of a corresponding federal German recertification programme is intended.