title: Impact of postprocessing on the detection of simulated pulmonary nodules with digital radiography.
abstract: The authors compared the impact of five postprocessing algorithms on diagnostic performance in the detection of simulated pulmonary nodules on storage phosphor-based digital chest radiographs. Tissue equivalent paraffin nodules (0.5-2.5 cm diameter) were randomly positioned over the chest of a normal volunteer. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis of a total of 2500 observations by five readers indicated that the default unenhanced image having the appearance of a conventional chest radiograph (ROC area = 0.87 +/- 0.05) was as good as an image with moderate enhancement of medium frequencies (ROC area = 0.85 +/- 0.03), an image with reversed gray scale polarity (ROC area = 0.84 +/- 0.02), an image with reversed gray scale and moderate enhancement of medium frequencies (ROC area = 0.87 +/- 0.03), and an image with a linear rather than a sigmoid gradation curve and incorporating moderate enhancement of medium frequencies (ROC area = 0.87 +/- 0.03). The authors conclude that the specific algorithms they tested had no effect on the detection of pulmonary nodules.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 02114.
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Oestmann
authors.forename: J R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Rubens
authors.forename: P M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Bourgouin
authors.forename: J T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Rhea
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Llewellyn
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Greene
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D008961:Models, Structural; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement