Quality assurance results from a breast screening pilot study.

A mammography quality assurance programme has been established as part of the breast cancer screening pilot project based in south-east Queensland. Prospective radiology clinics are required to participate in the quality assurance programme as part of the project's accreditation requirements. The programme follows the ACPSEM position paper on quality assurance in mammography and is divided into radiographer and physicist tests. Radiographer tests include film processor sensitometry (daily), image quality (weekly) and focal spot measurements (monthly). Physicist tests occur annually. The programme has been running successfully for 12 months on 17 machines from 6 manufacturers. Of the radiographer tests, sensitometry has proved the most beneficial with a number of chemistry problems detected early. Physicist tests have found x-ray/light field misalignment and poor automatic exposure control performance as the most common machine problems. Results also show that our kVp measuring system requires recalibration.