For the study, mammogram readers across 46 specialized breast screening centers in England where given mammograms from more than 1 million women over the course of one year. The collective mammograms were collected in 37,688 batches. Each reader interpreted a median of 176 batches over the study period.
For the control group, two readers examined each batch of approximately 35 digital mammograms in the same order. Those in the intervention group read the same mammograms as one another but in different sequences. There was no significant change in the rates of cancer detection among participants in either group.
“Psychologists have been investigating a phenomenon of a drop in performance with time on a task called ‘the vigilance decrement’ since World War II. In those days radar operators searched for enemy aircraft and submarines which appeared as little dots of light on a radar screen. People thought that the ability to spot the dots might go down after too much time spent on the task. Many psychology experiments have found a vigilance decrement, but most of this research has not been in a real-world setting, unlike our study,” said Sian Taylor-Phillips, assistant professor at the University of Warick in Coventry, England.
Dr. Taylor-Phillips and her team are pushing their studies on vigilance decrement further by investigating whether examining mammograms at different times of day affects accuracy.
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