Purpose: The storage requirements for full-field digital mammography (FFDM) in a picture archiving and communication system are significant, so methods to reduce the data set size are needed. A FFDM crop tool for this purpose was designed, implemented, and tested.
Materials and methods: A total of 1,651 screening mammography cases with bilateral FFDMs were included in this study. The images were cropped using a DICOM editor while maintaining image quality. The cases were evaluated according to the breast volume (1/4, 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4) in the craniocaudal view. The image sizes between the cropped image group and the uncropped image group were compared. The overall image quality and reader's preference were independently evaluated by the consensus of two radiologists.
Results: Digital storage requirements for sets of four uncropped to cropped FFDM images were reduced by 3.8 to 82.9 %. The mean reduction rates according to the 1/4-4/4 breast volumes were 74.7, 61.1, 38, and 24 %, indicating that the lower the breast volume, the smaller the size of the cropped data set. The total image data set size was reduced from 87 to 36.7 GB, or a 57.7 % reduction. The overall image quality and the reader's preference for the cropped images were higher than those of the uncropped images.
Conclusion: FFDM mammography data storage requirements can be significantly reduced using a crop tool.