Historical technical developments in mammography.

In mammography it is most important to consistently produce high-contrast, high resolution images at the lowest radiation dose consistently with high image quality. Today it is possible to obtain mammograms with higher image quality that require significantly lower radiation dose compared to mammograms dating back to the 1970's and early 1980's. Some of the technical developments due to x-ray equipment and image receptors and quality control programs that have let to todays high quality mammographic images are discussed in this article.