Background/introduction
Diagnostic Reference Levels (DRL) in CT procedures are important tools to optimise radiation doses delivered to patients by identifying cases where the levels of doses are unusually high.
Patient radiation dose depends on the number of CT phases required in the same examination and on image quality requirements for diagnosis.
Indeed,
the patient radiation dose in CT-examination depends on clinical indication.
The purpose of this study was to establish our local DRL (LDRL) in adult CT examinations in function of clinical indications.
These clinical DRLs...
Description of activity and work performed
Data collection
A retrospective data collection was conducted on patients aged > 18 years and weighted 70 ± 10 kg who underwent CT-examinations in our department in 2017.
Six clinical indications in trunk region (Table 1) was studied based on their frequency in our department.
The total examination Dose length product (DLP) values were collected from the Dose Archiving and Communication System (Radiation Dose Monitor,
Medsquare).
The clinical indication was extracted from the medical report.
Fifty-fifth and 75th percentile values of total DLP were calculated...
Conclusion and recommendations
Discussion:
When comparing different indications within same body region,
examination DLP analysis showed significantly higher values for tumor assessment indication compared to other indications.
This can be explained by the high image quality requirements for this indication.
Other published studies on DRLs are only based on an anatomic region and on single CT phase.
A very few studies involved the influence of clinical indication on the total DLP of the examination [1].
The 75th percentile values of total DLP in our study were higher than...
Personal/organisational information
Bouchra HABIB GERYES,
PhD,
medical physicist
Hôpital Universitaire Necker Enfants-Malades
Service de Radiologie adulte
149 rue de Sèvres,
75743 Paris Cedex 15,
France
Mail:
[email protected]
References
Shrimpton PC,
Hiller MC,
Meeson S,
Golding SJ (2014) Doses from computed tomography (CT) examinations in the UK – 2011 review.
Public Health England website.
Available via https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/349188/PHE_CRCE_013.pdf.
Accessed 10 December 2018