According to European guidelines, breast compression during mammography should be firm but tolerable. However, the lack of consistent compression guidelines has led to wide variation in execution. The aim of the study “Real-time pressure indicator makes mammographic breast compression more reproducible than a rule of thumb,” was to investigate the influence of compression protocols on mechanical parameters. Researchers from the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam used VolparaAnalytics to assess the impact of different breast compression protocols on changes in applied force, pressure and breast contact area. The results demonstrated that a pressure-guided protocol using a compression paddle with a real time pressure indicator resulted in a reduction in force and pressure and more consistency between patients.

Mammographic breast positioning is crucial for clinical interpretation but is time consuming and subjective to assess. In the scientific exhibit, “A validation study of automated mammographic breast positioning metrics,” (#4755) Volpara evaluated the performance of a novel algorithm for the automatic assessment of four breast positioning metrics from digital mammograms, comparing to a visual ground truth analysis. Volpara Density Maps was used to evaluate the positioning metrics of nipple location and nipple in profile, nipple angle on the CC view and whether the inframammary fold (IMF) was present on the MLO in more than 700 images. The detection of the nipple location was excellent with agreement within 10mm in 99.4% of the cases. The performance of the algorithm to detect the nipple in profile, if IMF was visible and the correct nipple direction was very good with 85%, 88% and 73% agreement respectively, with ground truth assessment. Overall the automated positioning algorithm was highly robust and has the potential to improve the efficiency of assessing mammographic breast positioning.


EuroSafe Imaging is the ESR’s latest initiative in radiation protection, which aims to promote the safe and appropriate use of medical imaging in Europe and around the world. Volpara Solutions is presenting a poster, “Real-Time Mammography Dose Monitoring and Optimisation using Big Data” (ESI-0033) outlining the new potential to use big data analytics to optimise dose and evolve dose monitoring beyond the use of phantoms and diagnostic reference levels. Using Volpara’s suite of quantitative breast imaging tools, users can accurately measure the actual dose delivered to the glandular tissue of the individual women’s breast. Computing and presenting the dose for every women imaged within a screening programme using VolparaEnterprise, allows optimisation of dose monitoring and facilities relative comparison across the programme, resulting in easy outlier analysis to identify subtle discrepancies between machines.

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