Medical audit of mammography screening examinations

Abstract

Objective: To audit our mammography screening practice and evaluate the usefulness of BI-RADS (Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System) lexicon in the classification of mammography findings. Method: In this study we performed a medical audit of our mammography screening practice between 1 st December 1999- 1st December 2000. Results: The number of baseline screening examinations were 2007 (67.2%) while the remaining 1041 (32.8%) were performed on women already screened at least once. Recall rate is 3.5%, PPV1 9.9%, PPV2 20%, and PPV3 25%. Overall cancer detection rate is 0.69% for 21 diagnosed cancers. Minimal cancer ratio is 14.3% and axillary lymph node involvement ratio is 33.3%. Conclusion: Standardisation of mammographic reporting and auditing the data are important in assessing an optimal screening facility. Every mammography screening center should audit its data to improve the outcome and to monitor the effectiveness.