Rosslyn, Va. - As part of its ongoing commitment to ensuring safe, appropriate and effective medical imaging and radiation therapy, the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA) announced today a new industry-wide commitment to more expansively address patient safety in medical imaging by including new radiation dose safeguards.

A new radiation dose check feature will provide an alert to CT machine operators when recommended radiation dose levels - as determined by hospitals and imaging centers - will be exceeded. The alert is designed to provide a clear indication to health care providers when radiation dose adjustments made for a patient's exam would result in delivering a dose higher than the facility's pre-determined dose threshold for routine use. Known as a "reference dose," this dose threshold level at which the new alert will appear will be set by clinicians. MITA and its member companies stand ready to work with professional organizations, regulatory bodies, and individual clinicians on implementing this feature and to assist in establishing these diagnostic reference dose values.

Moreover, manufacturers said today they are also committed to including an additional safeguard that will allow hospitals and imaging facilities to set maximum radiation dose limits that would prevent CT scanning at higher, potentially dangerous radiation levels. This feature is designed to prevent the use of hazardous levels of radiation that could lead to burns, hair loss or other injuries.
"Manufactures have revolutionized CT scanning by developing technology that delivers quality images at a radiation dose far below what it was just twenty years ago," said Dave Fisher, Executive Director of MITA. "Today's commitment builds on that history of innovation and our long-standing dedication to ensuring the safe, appropriate and effective use of our industry's cutting-edge medical technologies. Manufactures are already working on - or in some cases have already implemented - a version of these new patient safeguards and will be able to include them on new releases of CT products and to begin deploying them to currently installed CT systems before the end of this year."

"The American Society of Radiologic Technologists supports MITA's efforts to incorporate a radiation dose check feature on all new CT products. Radiologic technologists are equal partners on the medical imaging team, so the ASRT will work with MITA and imaging equipment manufacturers to make sure medical imaging exams remain safe and adhere to as low as reasonably achievable radiation dose guidelines," said ASRT President Diane Mayo, R.T.(R)(CT).

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