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Defending Digital Technology

We read with interest your May 19 article titled, “Staying Analog in a Digital World”, by Bob Stott, which was a thoughtful and informative piece on the future of analog film in light of the world going digital.

It is true that less and less analog film is being used in major hospitals and clinics, and that smaller hospital and imaging centers, particularly those located in rural areas, have not moved quickly to the digital world due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is cost.

The article highlights the VIDAR Systems Corporation’s SIERRA plus as a medical film digitizer specifically designed for low-volume radiology applications and engineered for smaller facilities. This is a true and accurate statement.

However, the article goes on to report a statement made by Richard Budde, Jr., MD, medical director of radiology at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati that says, “Film digitizers were utilized early on during the change over from analog, and there are facilities that are still trying to bridge the gap with them."

"However, the diagnostic quality is inferior, and the radiologist’s ability to manipulate the image is limited. The dilemma occurs when you produce a poor image on hard copy and then scan it into the digitizer for display. The additional information loss in the analog-digital transfer compounds the problem of the suboptimal resolution in the originally acquired image.”

We would point out to your readers that there are a variety of factors that affect the image quality in any imaging chain. In the very demanding imaging field of mammography, we often go into clinics that need to solve a problem in the transition to full-field digital mammography (FFDM).

More often than not, the expectation is that the image quality will not be acceptable, much less high-quality. Once the images are viewed in an appropriate environment, the clinics have overwhelmingly embraced this timesaving device as a positive workflow enhancement.

To ensure our products meet the needs in the radiology environment, VIDAR has participated in several clinical studies. Our most recent study is titled, “A Comparative Study of Conventional Mammography Film Interpretations with Soft Copy Readings of the Same Examinations”, reprinted from The Journal of Digital Imaging.

The study was conducted by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions School of Medicine, to determine if there was a difference in diagnoses made on digitized mammo images versus the original analog film. The answer – no!

Users of our medical film digitizers find that poorly exposed digitized images can be made “reportable” because once the image is digital, you can use window and leveling tools to bring out certain elements in the image.

Of course, a poorly exposed original will make a less-than-perfect digitized image – but, in most cases, windowing and leveling can provide an improved image. We understand that by virtue of scanning the images, some resolution is lost, but is it clinically relevant and even noticeable on a system which has been properly set up?

In closing, we want readers to know that medical film digitizers are used across the radiological spectrum to digitize analog film. It is a very cost-effective way to move into the digital world and a critical component to almost any initial PACS purchase.

We invite your readers to see for themselves the quality of film digitizers today. We are happy to scan sample films, burn them to a CD, and return the film along with the CD containing the digital images for review and judgment by radiologists.

Please visit www.filmdigitizer.com for more information.

— Mary Harp, MBA, director, film digitizer business line, VIDAR Systems Corporation, Herndon, Va.


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