Pressure and breast thickness in mammography-what about physics?

摘要

In recent years, our group has been especially interested in compression and its role in mammography. Therefore, our interest was immediately aroused by the title of the article by Hogg et al [1] published in the January 2013 edition of BJR. We were very surprised by the fact that "pressure" was expressed in daN (decanewtons) [and alternatively in most graphs in dN (decinewtons)]. So, apparently, the subject of the article was force and not pressure and the title is thus very confusing. In our group, we are trying to prove that pressure [force/ area expressed in Nm 2=Pa (pascal)] is a better entity to standardise in mammography, so we do not consider exchanging pressure for force as a slip of the pen. In a physical phenomenon such as compression, we think it is essential to present physics in a proper way. We have noticed before that, in the mammography literature, there is a bad tradition when using physics, and mixing up force and pressure is not an exception.