An Investigation into the Consistency in Mammographic Density Identification by Radiologists: Effect of Radiologist Expertise and Mammographic Appearance

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate how radiologist expertise and image appearance may have an impact on inter-reader variability of mammographic density (MD) identification. Seventeen radiologists, divided into three expertise groups, were asked to manually segment the areas they consider to be MD in 40 clinical images. The variation in identification of MD for each image was quantified by finding the range of segmentation areas. The impact of radiologist expertise and image appearance on this variation was explored. The range of areas chosen by participating radiologists varied from 7 to 73% across the 40 images, with a mean range of 35 ± 13%. Participants with high expertise were more ..