Teaching syllabus for radiological aspects of breast cancer screening with digital mammography

The purpose of this study is to discuss the content of our new accreditation programme for radiologists' reading digital mammograms in a screening setting and to report our first experience with the new course. The course consisted of a theoretical part, given by the medical physicist, and a practical part given by the radiologist. The practical session is closely linked with the theoretical part and a reading session. The material is fully digital and can be presented on different platforms. In practice, the need for parallel soft-copy reading sessions on high-end workstations limits the number of participants. A high level of interactivity was noted between teacher and participant, with a thorough discussion of different digital mammography systems during a single teaching course. The main challenge for the teacher turned out to be the collection of representative material and the continuous updating of the material: new systems, processing techniques and artefacts need to be included regularly.