Chest image quality: film-screen vs. computed radiography.

Chest image quality is of three types: image attractiveness, physical measurement, and diagnostic yield measurement. Each is important, but it is the Georgetown group's opinion that it is the improvements in diagnostic yield that can result from the reconstruction of a single set of digital information with different image algorithms, each selected as best for a particular suspected disease, that will drive the conversion from conventional film radiography to storage phosphor plate radiography and that it is a combination of the need for the dissemination of images within hospitals and the desire to view several different reconstructions of chest digital data that will lead to chest radiographic images being interpreted on workstations. In its current form CR has been shown to be equivalent in diagnostic yield to FR. As better reconstruction algorithms are tested and proved, they are expected to demonstrate better diagnostic yield than FR.