Sp. Hennigs et al., Digital chest radiography with a large-area flat-panel silicon X-ray detector: clinical comparison with conventional radiography, EUR RADIOL, 11(9), 2001, pp. 1688-1696
This was a radiologists' preference study to compare a digital chest radiog
raphy system that utilizes a large-area silicon flat-panel detector with co
nventional radiography for visualizing anatomic regions of the chest. Conve
ntional and digital posteroanterior (PA) and lateral chest radiographs were
obtained in 115 patients. The PA and lateral image pairs were compared ind
ependently by three radiologists rating the overall appearance, 11 anatomic
regions in the PA, and 9 in the lateral views. Statistical analysis was pe
rformed with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test with Bonferroni-Holm adjustment
(p = 0.05). For the PA view, the digital system performed significantly bet
ter for the overall appearance and for all anatomic regions except for the
peripheral pulmonary vasculature and hilum, where no significant difference
was found. For the lateral digital images, the regions trachea, costodiaph
ragmatic recess, and hilum were rated significantly worse. The regions retr
osternal and retrocardiac lung were rated significantly better. The other r
egions and the overall appearance showed no significant differences. The de
scribed digital chest radiography system showed statistically superior visu
alization of anatomic regions for PA and an ambiguous performance for later
al images as compared with conventional radiography. After changing some im
age processing parameters for the lateral view, this system may be suitable
for digitalization of chest radiography.