Recall rate of opportunistic screening mammography in a university referral breast center in Iran

Abstract EN

Background: Noinformation has been published on the effectiveness of digital non-diagnostic opportunistic screeningmammography in Iran that is measured by recall rate as one of its indices.

Objectives: In this longitudinal study, we measured recall rate of non-diagnostic mammography at a tertiary referral university hospital and made a comparison with reported international data.

Methods: We examined 9395 digital mammograms performed in 2014 - 2015 from which, 2930 were the first-time and 6465 were subsequent mammography.

The patients were referred to the university hospital by their clinicians during annual check-ups while none of them had any chief complaint.

The mean age was 49 years.

We calculated recall rate, sensitivity, specificity, and cancer detection rate.

Results: Breast cancer was diagnosed in 80 patients.

Recall rateswere 29% for the first-time and 22% for subsequentmammography, and the overall rate of cancer incidence was 8.5 per 1000 mammograms (80/9395) with specificity of 75.9%, sensitivity of 97.5%, PPV of 3.4%, and NPV of 99%.

Conclusions: The recall rate was much higher in this setting than the acceptable range reported in literature.

However, the sensitivity and detection rate were higher; thus, the higher recall rate could be due to some differences in the patient population such as being at younger ages and higher risks