ABSTRACT
Mammography is an X-ray examination of the breast, obtained by dedicated equipment, optimized for breast cancer detection or characterization. This chapter describes the main components of clinical mammography and tomosynthesis units, and discusses both the aspects of diagnostic performance and radiation dose. Multiple components of clinical mammography units can be grouped as follows: X-ray source, acquisition geometry, digital detector, scatter rejection methods, automatic exposure control and image post-processing. One benefit of digital mammography is that the large amount of information captured by the raw images can be successfully used by computers to improve the performance. Clinical performance studies comparing digital to screen-film mammography succeeded to prove the non-inferiority of digital mammography, but not its superiority. Most of the clinical studies with digital breast tomosynthesis aimed to prove the added value of tomosynthesis in combination with mammography, rather than aiming to replace mammography with tomosynthesis.
