Telereporting in Breast Imaging Involving More Than 1 Country Requires Careful Consideration

To examine the effect that a test set from 1 region of the world has on the performance of expert breast radiologists from that region and from a distant region.

Forty-seven Australian and 15 Singaporean breast radiologists interpreted the same test set (ie, 60 mammograms of Australian women consisting of 40 typical and 20 atypical cases) in their respective locations. The radiologists assigned each case a confidence score of 1 to 5, where 1 was typical, 2 was benign, and 3 to 5 indicated identifiable cancer. Localization-response operating characteristic area under the curve (AUC), receiver operating characteristic AUC, location sensitivity, case sensitivity, and specificity were calculated for each radiologist and compared between Australian and Singaporean readers using nonparametric 2-tailed Mann-Whitney U tests.

Australian readers performed better than did their Singaporean counterparts with respect to localization-response operating characteristic AUC (.738 vs .642, P = .0395) and location sensitivity (.775 vs .660, P = .0185).

Technological advancement has made possible telereporting, in which radiologists report on mammograms originating from other countries. However, those readers' levels of performance might be affected by interpreting images from populations that are different from those with which they are familiar.

Radiologist performance differed between the groups when localization of lesions was taken into account. This difference might be because of the Australians' reading mammograms from populations with which they were familiar, in contrast to the Singaporeans.