If you don't find it often, you often don't find it: why some cancers are missed in breast cancer screening.

ABSTRACT: Mammography is an important tool in the early detection of breast cancer. However, the perceptual task is difficult and a significant proportion of cancers are missed. Visual search experiments show that miss (false negative) errors are elevated when targets are rare (low prevalence) but it is unknown if low prevalence is a significant factor under real world, clinical conditions. Here we show that expert mammographers in a real, low-prevalence, clinical setting, miss a much higher percentage of cancers than are missed when the mammographers search for the same cancers under high prevalence conditions. We inserted 50 positive and 50 negative cases into the normal workflow of the breast cancer screening service of an urban hospital over the course of nine months. This rate was slow enough n

SUBMITTER: Evans KK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3667799 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature