A LINEAR MODELING APPROACH TO AUTOMATIC INTERPRETATION OF QUALITY-CONTROL MEASUREMENTS IN MAMMOGRAPHY

An approach to the automated interpretation of quality control data is described in which the relationship between small changes in system p erformance and the resulting small changes in the measured quality con trol test results are approximated as a set of linear equations in mat rix form. The inverse of this forward matrix is then used to identify causal changes from the set of measured changes. This approach has bee n investigated for the case of mammographic screening quality assuranc e and shown to provide a potentially useful tool to assist in the inte rpretation task.