Congress:
EuroSafe Imaging 2019
Keywords:
Action 4 - Dose management systems, Action 2 - Clinical diagnostic reference levels (DRLs), Action 6 - Clinical audit tool for imaging, Thorax, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, CT, Dosimetry, Radiation safety, Quality assurance, Dosimetric comparison
Authors:
E. Balázs, Z. Dankó, P. Bágyi, L. Balkay, L. Urbán
DOI:
10.26044/esi2019/ESI-0107
Description of activity and work performed
From June of 2017 to November of 2018,
dosimetric data of patients referred to our department for contrast-enhanced chest CT examinations were enrolled in the study.
Final study population consisted of 1446 and 1191 patients and scans were performed with a GE BrightSpeed S 16 slice (Scanner1) scanner and a Siemens SOMATOM Definition AS 64 slice (Scanner2) scanner,
respectively.
Dose management software automatically collects dosage information from the scanners and estimates the effective dose.
The effective dose values were calculated based on the DLP,
on the examined body part,
and the patient’s weight. Each dose report DICOM file was automatically sent to a dedicated PACS server and an appropriate algorithm calculated the effective dose data.
The average monthly effective dose values are shown on Fig. 1 ,
Fig. 2 .
The average effective dose was calculated on the basis of a given month’s average.
The change of effetive dose values from the first record of the database are shown on Fig. 3 .
and Fig. 4 .
Comparison of chest CT protocols before and after optimization is presented on Fig. 5
Reduction of the field of view and the number of scanning phases resulted in 38,67 % less median effective dose on Scanner1 and 46,93 % less median effective dose on Scanner 2 in the examined population.