Phantom study of chest radiography with storage phosphor, selenium, and film-screen systems.
OBJECTIVE
Chest radiographs from 3 digital systems--2 based on luminescent phosphors and one on selenium--and a conventional film-screen system were evaluated and compared.


METHODS
Computed radiography (CR) has for the past years been dominated by a single manufacturer, but now several systems have been marketed. Using a chest phantom and, as test objects, 2 simulated tumours for the lung and mediastinum, respectively, and one object simulating pulmonary lines, a total of 400 exposures were made, 100 on each system. The test objects were placed randomly with a ratio of presence/absence of each object of about 50. Six radiologists participated, 2 residents and 4 staff members. A receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was performed with construction of curves, and the difference between the curves was estimated with a 2-tailed paired t-test.


CONCLUSIONS
The selenium-based system performed significantly better for pulmonary line detection than all the other systems, and better than one storage phosphor system for the lung "tumour" (p < 0.05), while one storage phosphor system was slightly better than the other in diagnosing all 3 test objects. The score for the film-screen system was only average.
Kehler
M
M
Department of Radiology, Central Hospital, Karlskrona, Sweden.
Lyttkens
K
K
Andersson
B
B
Hochbergs
P
P
Lindberg
C G
CG
Medin
J
J
Nordström
A J
AJ
Sanfridsson
J
J
Vojciechowski
J
J
D006801:Humans; D008163:Luminescent Measurements; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D008479:Mediastinal Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D012372:ROC Curve; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013902:Radiography, Thoracic / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012643:Selenium; D014963:X-Ray Intensifying Screens
D012643:Selenium