"It doesn't matter to the CT scanner if your patient is a 400-pound overweight patient, or a 100-pound skinny person, or a 30-pound kid," Shih said. "But the actual amount of radiation the patient is exposed to is different," even with the same CT scanner settings, as lighter, smaller patients are actually getting a bigger dose. Working with radiation physicists, the team was able to provide adjustments so physicians can better gauge what the patient is actually receiving.

Shih said the Valkyrie is compatible with older CT scanners that don't create dosage reports with dosages tagged in metadata that are easily indexed, making it time-consuming or inefficient to pull up exposure histories. He thinks this is critical, as these older scanners represent the bulk of those still in use.


While Shih hopes to get his system into imaging centers and hospitals, there are no commercial partners yet. "We developed it for patient safety," Shih said. "I don't know what the easiest and best path is [to release it]. It may turn out to be easier to commercialize it to get it to other hospitals."

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