Evaluating quality and utility in digital mammography

Image quality and utility become crucial issues for engineers, scientists, patients, regulators, administrators, insurance companies, and lawyers whenever there are changes in the technology by which medical images are produced. Examples of such changes include analog-to-digital conversion, lossy compression for efficient transmission and storage, image enhancement, and computer-aided methodology for diagnosis that affects the appearances of images. This paper is a summary of some principles for designing protocols for clinical experiments to quantify the relative qualities and utilities of different images, here analog, digital, and lossy compressed digital mammograms. A talk supplemented this paper with a status report on the specific experiment described which is scheduled to be conducted during summer 1995.