Abstract ID: 371 Patient dose calculation systems in diagnostic radiology: State of the art and conscious use

Autor: O. Rampado
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Physica Medica. 56:282-283
ISSN: 1120-1797
Popis: Several programs have been developed during the last years to calculate patient dose in the various specialties of radiodiagnostics, from conventional and interventional radiology to computed tomography. There is a tendency to improve the personalization of organ dose assessment, using adaptable models or libraries of virtual phantoms covering the entire population size range, including paediatric and bariatric patients. These tools are now also integrated into the patient dose tracking software, allowing an automatic extraction of the input parameters necessary for the calculation, already available in the archive. Steps forward have been taken in the estimation of skin dose maps in interventional radiology, while the modeling of dose reduction systems in CT, in particular the various tube current modulation approaches, is still rather poor in most cases. Despite the easy and immediate user interface often available with these programs, their proper implementation need a conscious use by a competent medical physicist. In particular, the degrees of approximation of the dose indicators and of the other input parameters of the calculation must be considered, verifying the relative weight on the final uncertainty of the assessment. The industry constantly produces new-concept radiological equipment with unique characteristics, for which it is often necessary to consider particular values of the required variables for the calculation, in order to obtain the best possible simulation. As an example, in the case of cone beam CT equipments, there are no dedicated patient dose calculation programs, so it is possible to use an existing software developed for conventional CT or projective radiology with a proper adaptation strategy. In these cases, to verify the accuracy of the evaluations it is essential a comparison with experimental validation measurements, carried out ad hoc or derived from already published experimental studies. Particular attention must be paid to extended organs, such as the skin and bone marrow, and to partially irradiated organs. In conclusions, it is quite easy to obtain dose values from these software, but it is not always so easy to consider their reliability and effectiveness in the area of patient radiation protection and optimisation.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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