Assessing an individual's film reading ability

Excerpt

Reading a breast screening case is a complex skill that experienced consultant radiologists regularly accomplish within seconds. What constitutes such skill, how is it learnt and is it a skill restricted to radiologists? Case classification, mammographic feature identification, sensitivity, specificity and ROC analysis have all been measured to gain insight into the film reading skill of individual radiologists, breast physicians and radiographers as they undertake a film reading task. Data evidence that these groups can perform almost equally well potentially indicates that, within some constraints, film reading could be undertaken by non-radiologists. However, film reading is subject to wide inter- and intra-individual variability and this has to be borne in mind when considering any individual's potential for film reading. …