With the increasing number of breast cancer worldwide, it has become crucial for every woman out there to go through proper breast cancer screening upon detection of even mild symptoms. Early detection acts as a magic wand against breast cancer which is devouring a vast portion of the population. 

Mammography is the x-ray machine used for screening the breast, and to date, it is the most updated and advanced x-ray machine built by humans for breast screening. Along with monthly breast-self examinations and clinical exams, mammograms can be the best tool for early breast cancer diagnosis. 

The accuracy of mammography 

According to many research units, image quality errors are linked with suboptimal care for women, including unfavorable outcomes like delay in cancer detection and overtreatment. Even failing to achieve the standard positioning criteria can drop the accuracy of mammography from 84.4% to 66.33% 

Most people make the common mistake of underestimating the importance of positioning while trying to improve the accuracy of mammography. You must understand that only those parts of the breast that appear under the mammography machine can be analyzed for different risk factors, including cancer. 

Why is the accuracy of mammography so important?

Even improper separation of overlapping breast tissues because of inadequate compression pressure can result in suboptimal outcomes, which can mask actual breast cancer. Additionally, various research shows that almost 50% of audited images fail accreditation during auditing of the image quality produced by mammography facilities. 

Every woman deserves proper breast cancer screening with high image quality so the deadly ailment can be cured before it spreads to the other parts of the body. With declining accuracy, you will never be able to detect cancer at early stages, even when the patient is concerned about the symptoms at the right time. 

That being said, women’s health is not the only factor that should motivate you to go for mammography physicist testing. Better accuracy also results in improved workflow efficiency and thus reduces the overall cost of the clinic. That’s partly because improving the quality of images results in fewer technical recalls. 

What can you do to improve the accuracy of mammography?

In addition to mammography physicist testing, there are many other ways to improve the accuracy of your book. But the two most talked about and used methods of improving mammography accuracy besides mammography physicist testing are;

● Standardized image quality evaluation 
● On-demand analytics 

Standardized image quality evaluation for every mammography 

Every woman indeed deserves good quality mammography testing. But if you consider skin folds, portion cut-off, compression pressure, inadequate IMF, the visual evaluation provided to women is not even of average standards. 

In individual physicians, compounding the problem is the variability along with technologist visual perceptions. Each person analyzing the mammography may come up with different criteria for image quality, which contributes to poor image quality. 

But by using a modern automated solution, you can get the same assessment done in just a couple of seconds. This feature includes comprehensive quality assurance on every mammogram taken in the clinic or the whole health system. 

In addition to being fast, the automated solution helps you eliminate the issue of variability and does so by completely standardizing the assessment. This means the entire assessment process is automatically done by the software based on a uniform read of image quality. 

On-demand analytics for value-based care

For delivering value-based care, you need to have health system-wide analytics. If you do not have a standardized AI-powered image quality evaluation, improving the accuracy of your mammography will become out of your reach. 

But even in this case, the capacity to benchmark is crucial to health system administration as it aids them in gathering critical insights of quality performance. And based on these insights, meaningful action can be taken to improve service delivery and patient health under value-based care. 

When it comes to benchmarking within mammography quality, this must include offering baseline performance data against key quality measures like compression pressure and even positioning. And by having an automated solution, the cache of the entire hospital system can be analyzed for improving the benchmarking process. 

Just equipping your clinic or hospital facility with mammography is not enough to ensure you are maintaining the accuracy of the results in the best possible way. As discussed at the outset of the article, even a little bit of tweaking in the position can decrease mammography accuracy to extreme levels.

Use the tips mentioned in this blog post for improving the accuracy of your mammography and give better results for women seeking a diagnosis of their ailment related to breast.