Abstract ID: 17322 Title: Patient Radiation Exposure Tracking
In the US, increases in average radiation dose to the population have been recognized as
being primarily due to increased use of medical radiation. The FDA, Joint Commission
and State regulatory bodies have issued guidelines and rules that mandate attention be
given to monitoring radiation use particularly when prescribing uses of radioactive
material, computed tomography, and fluoroscopically guided procedures. One method
that can provide monitoring of a patient or a group of patients is to organize a database
that leverages the radiation dose information provided with DICOM imaging studies,
series and images. Such a database has been created and automatically accepts a copy of
image data that is retrievable from PACs, or an imaging modality. The image data are
discarded but the radiation dose related information is archived in an intelligent fashion
so that automatic Alerts or user initiated web reports are generated to monitor an
individual, a modality, a group of patients for Quality Assurance purposes. Importantly,
this endeavour has revealed two important actionable realizations; the tools needed by
medical physicists include informatics based systems and secondly, a strong need exists
for further standardization in the US imaging community for naming descriptions for
acquisition protocols, metrics of radiation dose, operators identification.