Technical aspects of mammography.

Abstract

Mammographic technique has gone through a continuous change during the past decade with the advent of new dedicated mammographic units, new screen-film systems, molybdenum anode material, small focal spots, specially designed grids to reduce scattered radiation, very accurate automatic exposure control units, and so forth. The user side has also gone through many changes with the development of better ergonomics of the units, better and quicker compression, easy-to-load cassettes, advanced automatic exposure controls, and other advancements. Many of these new features have come to reality due to the screening projects going on in many countries. These projects often demand that approximately 100 patients are examined on one unit per day, and from this heavy demand, many new features have been developed. Screening has also brought patient-absorbed dose to the foreground. This concern is natural because large populations of healthy women are irradiated. In turn, this concern has made extended-cycle film development more desirable. Many new test phantoms that can be used to optimize and to maintain image quality have been developed. The large demand for throughput during screening requires very constant image quality during a single day, and week after week, making quality control a vital and critical necessity.