In a new study published online in the journal Radiology, Norwegian researchers found women who undergo full-field digital mammography have lower recall and biopsy rates than those screened with conventional breast techniques — suggesting digital procedures may reduce the number of diagnostic workups in cases where women are not at risk for breast cancer.
 

Past studies comparing the accuracy of the two techniques have reported conflicting results on biopsy and recall rates — the rate at which women are called back for additional tests. But the new study, which analyzed medical records from the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Program, clearly found an advantage to digital screening, by examining the rates of cases, recalls, biopsies, and screening-detected cancers.

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"The program invites women age 50 to 69 years to mammographic screening every two years," said Solveig Hofvind, from the Cancer Registry of Norway and Oslo University College, in Oslo, Norway. "We analyzed performance measures in the program as run in a usual setting."
 

In all, researchers analyzed the results from more than 1.8 million screening exams performed from 1996 to 2010, involving women with an average age of 58.8 years.
 

The results showed digital screening had lower rates of false positive exams and fewer biopsies with benign outcomes than conventional mammograms.