[Research on Utilization of LCD Monitors Substitute for Light Box about Hard-copy Diagnosis in an Emergency by Using...

The creation of the business continuity plan (BCP) for disaster key hospitals were mandated by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on March 31, 2017. The creation of BCP must take countermeasures assuming damage at all levels. In Japan, a light box is no longer being used by a shift to soft-copy diagnosis. However, supposing the hospital network failure occurred, we assumed the film diagnosis was necessary for radiological examination images. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the film diagnosis using a medical monitor with high luminance (410, 800 cd/m²) instead of the light box is inferior or not to a monitor diagnosis (410 cd/m²) in detecting pulmonary nodules. Ten radiological technologists participated in the observer tests for detection of nodules, respectively. In each observer test, radiological technologists marked their confidence levels for the diagnosis of pulmonary nodules. The detection performance of radiological technologists was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The average area under the ROC curve (AUC) value in detecting pulmonary nodules with monitor (410 cd/m²) and film (410 cd/m²), film (800 cd/m²) were 0.770 and 0.754, 0.806 respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between monitor (410 cd/m²) and film (410, 800 cd/m²) for detection of pulmonary nodules (P=0.32, 0.09). Therefore, we believe that the film diagnosis can be used for the medical monitor instead of the light box when film operation in case of a disaster inevitable.