Portable chest radiography: comparison of high-resolution digital displays with laser printed digital film

Computed radiology is a radiographic imaging technology that generates a conventional radiographic image in digital form. The image can be recorded on a laser sensitive film or archived to a digital storage device and displayed on a video monitor. This study was performed to evaluate the adequacy of reporting digitised images directly from the workstation. The test set consisted of portable chest images of 55 patients from the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. Normal structures and nine abnormalities were pre-selected for analysis. The radiographs and images on the video display were reviewed on two separate occasions, six months apart by two independent readers. No clinical details were supplied and the intraobserver and interobserver agreement were assessed using Kappa statistics. The overall results indicated that direct reporting from the workstation was as reliable as reporting from the laser printed copies.