A FROC analysis of radiographers performance in identification of distal radial fractures

Radiographers AUC scores of 0.87 demonstrates that there is potential for radiographers to recognise fractures with some accuracy. There is a trend of increasing performance with increasing experience. When this was compared to published data it is seen that radiologists outscored radiographers and a difference in performance exists between the groups. The radiologists as a whole and the MSK specialists scored a significantly higher than the radiographers with and AUC value of 0.92 (p ≤ 0.05) and 0.96 (p ≤ 0.001) respectively. Radiologists had fewer false positives than radiographers (P ≤ 0.007), however there was no difference was found in the false negatives (p ≤ 0.11). Further image interpretation training of radiographers should now be carried out and this experiment should be repeated