Quality assurance applied to mammographic equipments using phantoms and software for its evaluation

The image quality assessment in radiographic equipments is a very important item for a complete quality control of the radiographic image chain. The periodic evaluation of the radiographic image quality must guarantee the constancy of this quality to carry out a suitable diagnosis. Mammographic phantom images are usually used to study the quality of images obtained by determined mammographic equipment. The digital image treatment techniques allow to carry out an automatic analysis of the phantom image. In this work we apply some techniques of digital image processing to analyze in an automatic way the image quality of mammographic phantoms, namely CIRS SP01 and RACON for different varying conditions of the mammographic equipment. The CIRS SP01 phantom is usually used in analogic mammographic equipments and the RACON phantom has been specifically developed by authors to be applied to acceptance and constancy tests of the image quality in digital radiographic equipments following recommendations of international associations. The purpose of this work consists in analyzing the image quality for both phantoms by means of an automatic software utility. This analysis allows us to study the functioning of the image chain of the mammographic system in an objective way, so an abnormal functioning of the radiographic equipment might be detected.