Faculty of Medicine and Health

BREAST Newsletter

Edition 5, May 2023

BREAST workshop success at BIG!

After a 4-year hiatus, the 13th Breast Imaging (BIG) conference was back and bigger than ever! The BREAST team were able to again run an in-person workshop in Adelaide at the end of March.

We had a great turn out, with a total of 75 2D test sets read, 8 DBT test sets and 10 wonderful readers volunteering to do our latest test set research study on priors. This study is run by our PhD student, Judith David Akwo. If you are interested in learning more about it and keen to be involved, please reach out here. We also have more about the study and other BREAST studies detailed further on in this newsletter.

To top off a great workshop, we also had readers completing multiple test sets, just amazing! A special thank you to our extra team members for your help during the workshop; Dr Tong Li and Dr Dania Abu Awwad. We would also like to extend our thanks to LG and Regional Health whom provided the diagnostic monitors for our workshop and made sure all technology ran smoothly. Just wonderful service.

Our Director, Prof Sarah Lewis, also gave a wonderful 10-year overview presentation on BREAST, titled 'The BREAST (BreastScreen Reader Assessment STragegy) 10-year update'.

It is always a pleasure to meet many readers in-person and we will be back hosting a workshop later this year for RANZCR ASM in Brisbane. Hope to see you there!

What's next for BREAST?

As mentioned above, our next planned event is at RANZCR Annual Scientfic Meeting in October in Brisbane, where we will be running another in-person workshop. We will be releasing a new 2D test set at this meeting so please stay tuned for further details.

For more information on what's happening with BREAST, you are most welcome to view our website, where you will find informatoin on past projects, funding, news, and other related information or follow us on twitter @syd_BREAST.

View our website >

BREAST represented at two events for Women in Health

Sarah had the wonderul opportunity of being invited to give two talks in April.

At the Women in Super's Health Week hosted by one of our funding bodies, National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), Sarah gave a talk titled 'Intelligent screening for breast cancer screening in Australia'. This is based on some of our work coming from our research project. More about our NBCF funded research project can be found here.

Sarah also gave a talk about our BREAST research projects and industry engagement at a DIMA (Diagnostic Imaging and Monitoring Association) meeting, hosted by Canon Medical Systems ANZ. Her talk titled 'Women in Engineering. Where are they?', was very well received.

BREAST researchers at SPIE conference

Our BREAST researchers, Dr Zhengqiang (Howard) Jiang, Somphome (Ling) Siviengphanom and our Director Prof Sarah Lewis all gave wonderful presentations on current BREAST research projects. Travelling to San Diego, California, our team were able to showcase our results to the world.

In relevance to our NBCF project on AI, Howard presented a talk at SPIE titled 'How do you solve a problem like concordance? A study of radiologists' clinical annotations for mammographic AI training'.

Furthermore, Ling presented her work titled 'Global mammographic radiomic signature can predict radiologists' difficult-to-interpret normal cases'.

Sarah presented her students' work titled 'A comparative study of diagnostic performance and work experience of radiologists in three countries interpreting digital breast tomosynthesis'.

For anyone with a SPIE membership, you are welcome to read the papers here.

BREAST virtual webinar on DBT cases a success!

We had a wonderful turnout to our inaugural virtual webinar on DBT, hosted by one of our favourite colleagues, senior radiologist Dr Garvin Williamsz. With over 100 readers tuning in throughout the 2 hours, Garvin provided some of his own experience and insight into examining some selected DBT cases from our DBT Perth test set. If you missed it and would like to view our recorded zoom, please click here but hurry, the recorded link expires end 23rd May 2023! You can also claim CPD points, please email BREAST once viewed.

BREAST Research News

BREAST team off to a great start for 2023 - published research!

In Janurary this year, we were successful not once, not twice but three times for having our research accepted into 3 different peer-reviewed journals, outstanding! Well done team! Please find below details of each publication and a chance to read the articles.

Paper 1:

Titled 'The impact of prior mammograms on the diagnostic performance of radiologists in early breast cancer detection: A focus on breast density, lesion features and vendors using wholly digital screening cases', has been successfully published online in the Cancers Journal with open access. You are welcome to view it here.

Paper 2:

Titled 'Variations of image interpretations of radiologists from different populations in mammography and tomosynthesis with different levels of breast density' has been recently published in the SPIE digial library; Journal of Medical Imaging vol 10, issue 2, 025502. For those who have a subscription to SPIE, you are welcome to have a read.

Paper 3:

Titled 'Radiologists' performance in reading digital breast tomosynthesis with and without synthesized views for cancer detection' is freely available to read in the British Journal of Radiology.

Opportunity to volunteer for a BREAST study

Our research is always about conducting studies that aim to improve breast screening capabilities and experience. If you are in Sydney and are interested to give up some of your time, please get in contact with us via email as we are looking for volunteers for these two studies running April to July 2023.

Study 1:

Explore the effectiveness of individualised training test sets when applying intelligent algorithm support to readers who interpret screening mammograms. The AI will harness the weaknesses and strengths of individual readers and assign the readers to targeted training cases to enhance the diagnositc efficacy in breast cancer detection.

Study 2:

A PhD research project that will investigate the influence of prior mammograms on diagnostic performance. The purpose is to explore the impact of access to prior mammograms on the accurate interpretation by BreastScreen readers, adn to identify the characteristics of cases and readers that will benefit from accessing previous mammograms.

Follow BREAST on Twitter

Just a reminder for all news relating to BREAST, hot off the press, we will post on Twitter. Please follow us @syd_BREAST.

Kindest regards from the BREAST team,

Mel, Yun, Howard and Sarah

Keep in touch

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