Evaluation of image enhancement software as a method of performing half-count bone scans
| Autor: | Aaron J Krom, Daniel McCool, Maria Burniston, Margaret L. Hall, Shaunak Navalkissoor, Fred Wickham |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: |
medicine.medical_specialty
business.industry Radiation dose Diagnostic test Bone Neoplasms Diagnostic accuracy General Medicine Technetium Tc 99m Medronate Image enhancement Image Enhancement Bone scans Bone and Bones Confidence interval medicine Humans Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging Medical physics Radionuclide Imaging Nuclear medicine business Software Retrospective Studies |
| Zdroj: | Nuclear Medicine Communications. 34:78-85 |
| ISSN: | 0143-3636 |
| DOI: | 10.1097/mnm.0b013e32835afb45 |
| Popis: | Reducing the radiation dose and scanning time of diagnostic tests is often desirable. One method uses image enhancement software such as Pixon, which processes lower-count scans and aims to produce high-quality images. However, it is essential that diagnostic accuracy is not compromised. We compared the level of agreement between clinicians using standard scans, with half-count and Pixon-enhanced half-count scans. Bone scans from 150 patients referred to diagnose metastatic disease were degraded by a process of Poisson-preserving binomial resampling to generate equivalent half-count scans and then processed by Pixon software to recreate 'original' high-quality scans. Two experienced clinicians reported the scans in a randomized, blinded manner for metastatic disease (yes/no) and assigned a confidence level to this diagnosis. Levels of agreement between clinicians were calculated for the full-count, half-count, and Pixon-enhanced half-count scans and between scanning methods for each clinician. Agreement between clinicians for standard full-count scans was 92% (±4%, κ=0.80), compared with 92% (±4%, κ=0.79) for half-count scans and 87% (±5%, κ=0.70) for Pixon-processed half-count scans. Agreement for a single clinician viewing full-count versus half-count scans was 95% (±2%, κ=0.88), similar to the agreement for a single clinician viewing full-count versus Pixon-processed half-count scans (95%, ±2%, κ=0.88). With respect to confidence in diagnosis, 127 full-count scans were scored in the highest category, compared with 98 half-count and 88 Pixon-processed half-count scans. Switching to half-count scanning does not introduce more diagnostic disagreement than is already present between clinicians. However, clinicians feel less confident reporting half-count scans. The Pixon enhancement step improved neither objective diagnostic agreement nor clinician confidence. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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