Quality Control for Technologists in Digital Mammography

As of June 2006, there are 6 FDA-approved full-field digital mammography systems available for clinical use in the U.S. Each of these systems has a quality control program supplied by the manufacturer that sites must follow to satisfy FDA regulations. These tests are written to be similar to the quality control tests for screen-film mammography, but have differences due to the nature and physics of the digital detector, the soft-copy review workstation, and overall system design. These differences will be discussed in this paper as well as the requirements for performing quality control in digital mammography. Additionally, this document includes a section on tips and tricks that are not found in manufacturer’s quality control manuals.