Computer aided detection

Excerpt

Computer scientists first started thinking how computers could be programmed to interpret mammograms in 1967. The field (known as computer-aided diagnosis or CAD) became increasingly active in the 1990s with the promise of digital mammography. The research continues, but the best of the algorithms developed over the last decade have now been incorporated in commercial systems. These algorithms are capable of high degrees of sensitivity only at relatively low levels of specificity. The systems that depend on them are therefore best used to prompt a radiologist (or other trained film-reader) to the possible presence of an abnormality. …