Background
Dr Roland Holland and Ms Henny Rijken of the LRCB (The National Expert and Training Centre for Breast Cancer Screening ) in the Netherlands in partnership with Hologic, MeVis Breastcare, Barco, and Siemens will be offering a Digital Mammography Training and Self-Assessment Workshop in a non-threatening environment with high-end equipment.
Building on the success of many years of offering digital mammography workshops, the ABDA-BSS Digital Mammography Workshop will include at least 6 modules (datasets) with 30 cases per module. Each module has a mix of cancer cases along with a number of normals. Participants read the cases and choose whether they want to recall the patient or not. Participants then self-score their performance and are encouraged to meet with the faculty to review the cases that were misread. All of the cases in the course are backed up with pathology reports and/or are proven “normals”.
With two of the modules, participants can choose to use computer aided detection (CAD) in helping to make the decision whether to recall the patient or not.
The modules include cases provided by Hologic and Siemens, as well as analog cases that were scanned to be read on a diagnostic workstation.
Most experts would agree that adequate training and assessment of radiologist's reading skills is only possible on high-end workstations that are also suitable for actual clinical work. Adequate digital training on site is not easily accomplished due to site network log in limitations and patient confidentiality. Although the traditional training groups see this need, their solution to date is to attempt to do digital workstation training using PowerPoint slides and discussion and little if any hands-on hardware and software experience. |
