Radiologists’ performance in reading digital breast tomosynthesis with and without synthesized views for cancer detection

OBJECTIVE: The study aims to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of radiologists and radiology trainees in digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) alone vs DBT plus synthesized view (SV) for an understanding of the adequacy of DBT images to identify cancer lesions. METHODS: Fifty-five observers (30 radiologists and 25 radiology trainees) participated in reading a set of 35 cases (15 cancer) with 28 readers reading DBT and 27 readers reading DBT plus SV. Two groups of readers had similar experience in interpreting mammograms. The performances of participants in each reading mode were compared with the ground truth and calculated in term of specificity, sensitivity, and ROC AUC. The cancer detection rate in various levels of breast density, lesion types and lesion sizes between ‘DBT’ and ‘DBT + SV’ were also analyzed. The difference in diagnostic accuracy of readers between two reading modes was assessed using Man–Whitney U test. p < 0.05 indicated a significant result. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in specificity (0.67-vs-0.65; p = 0.69), sensitivity (0.77-vs-0.71; p = 0.09), ROC AUC (0.77-vs-0.73; p = 0.19) of radiologists reading DBT plus SV compared with radiologists reading DBT. Similar result was found in radiology trainees with no significant difference in specificity (0.70-vs-0.63; p = 0.29), sensitivity (0.44-vs-0.55; p = 0.19), ROC AUC (0.59-vs-0.62; p = 0.60) between two reading modes. Radiologists and trainees obtained similar results in two reading modes for cancer detection rate with different levels of breast density, cancer types and sizes of lesions (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Findings show that the diagnostic performances of radiologists and radiology trainees in DBT alone and DBT plus SV were equivalent in identifying cancer and normal cases. ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE: DBT alone had equivalent diagnostic accuracy as DBT plus SV which could imply the consideration of using DBT as a sole modality without SV.