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TREAT TB Convenes a Global Consultation on Digital Radiography “On 19-20 March 2010, The Union convened a productive Global Consultation on Digital Radiography in Paris, France. Twenty-two experts on tuberculosis control and digital radiography from more than 15 countries attended the event, which aimed to develop a provisional research agenda that would identify priority research questions related to digital radiography in adults. Currently, chest X-rays play a secondary role to sputum smears in the diagnosis of TB and their use is often limited by the poor quality of X-ray images or the expensive costs associated with the development of film or equipment. However, rapid advances in digital technology and increasing use of these innovations present an opportunity to overcome the barriers to using chest X-rays as effective diagnostic tools for TB in low resource-high burden settings.” The Global Consultation on Digital Radiography Report can now be found on the TREAT TB website: http://www.treattb.org/index.php/Documents/meeting-summaries.html During the 40th UNION World Conference in Cancún, December 2009, encouraging results from the first operational setting using CAD4TB in Zambia were presented by the NTCP and Zambart. At the 39th UNION World Conference in Paris, October 2008, a special session on radiology was organised. Below some quotes from the various presentations are listed on this subject. In the links under this menu two presentations can be viewed. "The way forward in Chest X-ray (CXR) is to use digital images. Digital images can be read immediately without processing, they have a constant high quality, the data can be much more efficiently stored and transmitted –allowing them to be diagnosed even by distant specialists- and settings for the readings can be standardized to support electronic interpretation of images". "Chest X-ray are reliable tests; readings correspond to biological variables on clinical trials" Recent research on - symptoms, signs in combination with Chest X-ray - demonstrates sensitivity levels of > 90%. "Chest X-ray films were often unreadable due to poor quality film, developing and/or storage" "Chest X-ray received too little focus for too long in TB programmes, neglecting the need for QA/QC" "Avoiding films by using digital Chest X-ray is an important advantage; Digital technology has a potential to solve most CXR problems" |