Keywords:
Dosimetric comparison, Radiation safety, Dosimetry, CT, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Radiation physics
Authors:
E. Lilla, E. Balázs, C. Sokvári, Z. Dankó, L. Urbán, P. Bágyi, L. Balkay; Debrecen/HU
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-2337
Aims and objectives
Recently,
the radiology community has spent significant effort to optimize the radiation dose from CT to ensure patient safety while keeping the highest possible diagnostic information [1,2,3,4].
For this purpose,
radiation dose tracking software were introduced by several vendors in the last few years.
These software can collect and archive dose values from several CT scanners to maintain an appropriate database which makes it possible to compared and analyze the different scan protocols [5].
However,
vendor’s radiation tracking software is usually expensive and not all applications give information about the patient effective dose (EffDose) only the DLP data are available.
Therefore,
at our radiology department we developed a software environment on our PACS network which calculates and stores the effective dose values for each CT series and study.
The automatic exposure control (AEC) depends on the manufacturer,
thus the patient related effective dose (EffDose) and image noise may vary across scanner models.
At our radiology department there are three different CT scanners in which we intend to standardize the clinical protocols regarding image quality (IQ) [6,7,8].
The main purpose of this study is to compare radiation dose and IQ of abdominal CT investigations on the three scanners using the original AEC settings.