Rising use of computed tomography (CT) has been documented due to its ubiquitous presence, ease of operation, short acquisition time, emerging applications and positive impact on patient throughput. Over the past 30 years the utilization of CT in the U.S. has been steadily growing at the rate of approximately 10% per year, approaching 80 million scans per annum (1). The rapid expansion comes at a cost of a higher radiation burden in comparison to other imaging modalities. In Switzerland, albeit responsible for only 6% of...

Hospital Set-up, CT Scanner Specifications and IT Set-up Data for a period of two years (between January 1st 2014 and December 31st 2015) was automatically tracked with a RTS (Radimetrics, Bayer HealthCare, Whippany, NJ) from seven CT scanners installed at five medical institutions located in North-western Switzerland. There were three regional hospitals, one private hospitals focusing on geriatric care and a university hospital. Data from all hospitals came from one CT scanner except the university hospital (University Hospital Basel), which has three CT scanners installed....

The cardinal advantage of dose monitoring softwares is the easy near real-time availability of the processed big-data, which was done earlier manually and hence was prone to marked errors. Therefore, guidelines can be made on the basis of a larger sample size which would be representative of the average doses in an institution rather than reflect the ‘best case scenario’ and reduce variability. Results from our study (with larger sample size) show that published national DRL are outdated, especially for CT thorax and that the...

Dr. Schindera is the Director of the dose-team at the University Hospital of Basel and initiated the development of a regional dose-registry by involving the local hospitals in North-Western Switzerland.

1. Brenner DJ, Hricak H. Radiation exposure from medical imaging: time to regulate? JAMA. 2010;304(2):208-9. 2. Aroua A, Samara ET, Bochud FO, Meuli R, Verdun FR. Exposure of the Swiss population to computed tomography. BMC Med Imaging. 2013;13:22. 3. Langlotz CP. RadLex: a new method for indexing online educational materials. Radiographics. 2006;26(6):1595-7. 4. Treier R, Aroua A, Verdun FR, Samara E, Stuessi A, Trueb PR. Patient doses in CT examinations in Switzerland: implementation of national diagnostic reference levels. Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2010;142(2-4):244-54.