Radiologists may not yet grasp what the implementation of CT lung screening programs would mean in practice, said presenter Bram van Ginneken, PhD, of Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Reading a screening mammogram may take seconds, but the Nederlands-Leuvens Longkanker Screenings Onderzoek (NELSON) trial found that it takes approximately 10 minutes to read and report one CT lung screening study.
"I have computed that if you would implement this in the Netherlands, depending on how many people you'd enroll in the screening, about 25% to 30% of all Dutch radiologists would have to stop what they are doing now and do full-time reading of lung screening CTs," van Ginneken said.
To help, Radboud's Diagnostic Image Analysis Group and Fraunhofer MEVIS in Germany teamed up to develop optimized CT lung screening reading software, which includes computer-aided detection (CAD) of nodules, automatic 3D volumetry of nodules, automatic elastic matching of prior and current studies, and reporting.
In their study, the researchers asked seven readers, including chest radiologists as well as nonradiologists, to interpret 69 cases from the NELSON CT lung cancer screening trial.
"After inspecting the CAD marks, [the readers] perform a quick scroll through the scan to see if any serious findings were missed," van Ginneken told AuntMinnie.com in an email. "We found that in this way you can read screening CT scans in less than one minute with excellent results, compared to the reference of the NELSON trial."
Readers then assigned the patient to one of three management categories. Because the cost of reading the scans constitutes a large part of the total costs of screening, this software could have a "tremendous positive effect on the cost-effectiveness of CT lung screening," van Ginneken said.
He noted that the software is now commercially available under the Veolity brand name by partner MeVis Medical Solutions.
