High-resolution monochrome liquid crystal display versus efficient household colour liquid crystal display: comparison of their diagnostic performance with unenhanced CT images in focal liver lesions

This study compared the ability of an efficient household liquid crystal display (LCD) and a medical high-resolution LCD to detect small hepatic lesions on unenhanced computed tomography (CT) images. We obtained the images from 100 subjects who had undergone abdominal CT. They consisted of 41 patients with a single space-occupying lesion (SOL) in the liver and 59 control subjects with no SOL. Independently, five radiologists rated their confidence concerning the presence of hepatic SOLs on a continuous scale from 0 to 1. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed using the jackknife method using the program LABMRMC. We evaluated the differences in A _z based on the 95% confidence intervals. The mean A _z of the five observers was 0.9594 with the efficient household LCD vs. 0.9335 with the medical high-resolution LCD. The difference was –0.0422, and the 95% confidence interval was –0.1101 to 0.0257 (p=0.2203). There was no significant difference in the A _z value between the two types of LCDs. The diagnostic performance with the household LCD was comparable to that with the high-resolution LCD, implying that the former type of LCD can be used to diagnose CT images.