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So what is the advantage of digital mammography?

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As I mentioned earlier, digital mammography has a wide dynamic

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range.

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Because of that, we see the different tissues in the breast,

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results in different shades on the image.

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For example, here on an image taken on an average-sized

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breast, the dense tissues always are much more brighter

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because they are

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more... And here you can see the breast tissue, and you can here see the

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fatty tissue. Here's the skin margin.

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You can almost see darkness here, and this is the air.

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The air aspect, this itself will act like a nice collimation.

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You can see here how closely the chest wall is imaged.

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That's one of the criteria. It is inspected on an annual basis by

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inspectors when they come and ask clinical images to see how good

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the images are done.

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So this is why the digital mammography has a wide

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dynamic range. It can accommodate all these tissues with

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this particular image. Now,

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I just want to throw in another one.

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This is showing on the top is the image of a

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phantom taken at three different exposure.

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In an analog image, if the exposure is too light,

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it becomes like this. It's almost impossible to read.

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If it is exactly right, probably by windowing, you can see the structure

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here. We have three masses. You can see one, two, three, four, three are not

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able to see, but again, this is the digitized of an analog

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image. If it is too dark, you're not able to see

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anything at all because it's very difficult.

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On the other hand, for the digital system,

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they were also taken the same technique now.

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This is at the right technique, you can see four fiber, three specked, and

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the four masses.

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When the image is done at a very low technique, you can still adjust the

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windowing and see the fibers here.

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You can still see the four fiber. You can see one, two, and

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probably three and a half here, and almost three and a half here.

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If it is too dark where you can't utilize the image, you can still

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lower the brightness and still able to utilize.

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That is the advantage of the digital mammography or digital radiography.

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It will not waste the exposure because you can salvage the

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image.

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One of the other thing with the digital radiography is early

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days when the technologists did a bad technique, the radiologist will

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immediately notice. Now, with the digital radiography, what

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happens, technologists can take an image, they can mask it and send it to the

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radiologist, and they can adjust the windowing level and so forth.

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Here's one example, especially for additional radiation

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exposure, which is not possible to find out

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with the digital radiography because we can mask the image

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before you can send it to the radiologist.

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So here is, this is the two images transferred to radiologist after

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masking.

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So the images were sent. This is the pediatric kids.

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You can see that the anatomy can easily, nicely, AP, and lateral

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view.

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But in reality, the technologists had taken this one.

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This is what it has captured, and then they just mask

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to the area of interest and they send it to you.

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This can result in a high dose to the exposure, exposing the

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subject without needing to do that.

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And in fact, we use this in our training of radiologist to be aware

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of this mask.

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Here is a moderately dense breast tissue.

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In the analog, it was almost impossible to see the object here.

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With the digital, you can actually visualize by windowing

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level if there's a whole suspicious area here,

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overlapping area.

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This is a typical digital mammography system.

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Here is the digital detector, which is an amorphous silicon

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detector in this case, and we have also amorphous

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selenium detector built into the system, so there are two

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type of detectors can routinely used in mammography.

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The soft tissue image will allow for us to

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magnify to some extent. That is not possible with the

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film screen. That is another additional advantage of full field digital

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mammography system because soft tissue display of digital mammography

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shows magnification of suspicious area.

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This is evaluated without additional radiation exposure to the patient.