MammoTrainer — Computer-based Training for Soft-Copy Reading of Mammograms on PC

The introduction of digital mammography into the clinical practice will considerably change the radiologists’ reviewing process. The MammoTrainer is a self-training software for PC that allows physicians, technicians, and medical students to improve and test their skills in soft-copy reading of screening mammograms. It is built on a database of 350 screening cases (300 non-suspicious cases and 50 histologically proven cancers) with more than 2.000 mammograms from the Dutch national breast cancer screening program. A training session is divided into three phases: (1) specification of an individual training set, (2) reading and classification into suspicious (recall for further diagnosis) or non-suspicious (no further diagnosis required) cases, and finally (3) results and solution based on the ground truth obtained from follow-up mammograms (normals) and pathology (cancers). The MammoTrainer is designed to run on standard PCs under Windows.