Congress:
EuroSafe Imaging 2020
Keywords:
Performed at one institution, Observational, Retrospective, Quality assurance, Screening, Mammography, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Breast, Action 2 - Clinical diagnostic reference levels (DRLs)
Authors:
D. Gans, L. Cockmartin, S. Dewilde, H. Bosmans
DOI:
10.26044/esi2020/ESI-11149
Background/introduction
Dosimetry in breast x-ray imaging is important in order to evaluate the potential harm caused to the patient due to ionising radiation. In particular for breast cancer screening dealing with healthy women the risk-benefit balance should be carefully assessed.
Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has shown to improve cancer detection compared to digital mammography (DM) in a screening population [1-3]. Hence, the benefit of DBT in screening has been proven. However, not many countries have adapted to DBT-based breast cancer screening due to ongoing debates on overdiagnosis, monetary costs and implications on workflow. Additionally, there is a concern for the increased radiation dose caused by DBT in comparison to DM. Nevertheless, publications on patient dosimetry in DBT are scarse [4-6], especially clinical dose reports for DBT systems of different vendors are difficult to find.
The aim of this work is to report on patient doses of DM and DBT for different state-of-the-art systems, to assess the patient dose distribution versus breast thickness for each system and finally to verify the accuracy of indicated doses in the dicomheader of DBT images.