Image quality analysis of digital mammographic equipments

The image quality assessment of a radiographic phantom image is one of the fundamental points in a complete quality control programme. The good functioning result of all the process must be an image with an appropriate quality to carry out a suitable diagnostic. Nowadays, the digital radiographic equipments are replacing the traditional film-screen equipments and it is necessary to update the parameters to guarantee the quality of the process. Contrast-detail phantoms are applied to digital radiography to study the threshold contrast detail sensitivity at operation conditions of the equipment. The phantom that is studied in this work is C.D.M.A.M. 3.4, which facilitates the evaluation of image contrast and detail resolution. One of the most extended indexes to measure the image quality in an objective way is the Image Quality Figure (I.Q.F.). This parameter is useful to calculate the image quality taking into account the contrast and detail resolution of the image analysed. The contrast-detail curve is useful as a measure of the image quality too, because it is a graphical representation in which the hole thickness and diameter are plotted for each contrast-detail combination detected in the radiographic image of the phantom. It is useful for the comparison of the functioning of different radiographic image systems, for phantom images under the same exposition conditions. The aim of this work is to study the image quality of different images contrast-detail phantom C.D.M.A.M. 3.4, carrying out the automatic detection of the contrast-detail combination and to establish a parameter which characterize in an objective way the mammographic image quality. This is useful to compare images obtained at different digital mammographic equipments to study the functioning of the equipments. (authors)