Congress:
EuroSafe Imaging 2019
Keywords:
Quality assurance, Dosimetric comparison, Radiation safety, Dosimetry, CT, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Radiation physics, Computer applications, Action 8 - Radiation protection training and learning material, Action 4 - Dose management systems
Authors:
J. Sanguesa, D. Fabri, P. Soffia
DOI:
10.26044/esi2019/ESI-0095
Description of activity and work performed
One of the many ways Radimetrics helps monitor radiation dose is through alerts.
Alerts may be set to notify events such an examination exceeding a specific dose value,
a patient who is reaching its cumulative dose threshold or dose calculation problems.
Those thresholds are determined by the users.
The way we reviewed these alerts is through the alert’s inbox,
where the events appear based on your own settings (fig.
1).
Each of these alerts must be checked and put into a deviation category (fig.
2).
Deviation categories are created to represent and assign different types of root causes to specific alerts.
The most common in our experience are: “protocol selection”,
a common example for this would be when a technologist is going to perform a head CT with and without contrast and selects the protocol “without” (that has only one acquisition) and “repeats” the series.
For the software,
this represents a head CT without contrast,
but two series were performed (with and without).
So,
the radiation dose index associated to this exam is the double as expected for that protocol.
Another deviation category we see often is “multi exam without specific protocol”.
This occurs when radiologists or clinicians ask for more CT phases than usual or add series or acquisitions on other anatomic zones depending on the findings.
Another example is repeated acquisitions,
most frequently due to patient motion.
At the beginning,
we were triggering too many alerts.
The first cause was mistakes in protocol selection,
as the example mentioned above.
The other reason is that we were using the 95 percentile of the statistics of radiation dose index as threshold,
but we then changed it to the 98th percentile.