by
Nancy Ryerson, Staff Writer | June 24, 2013
From the June 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
"CARE kV automates the selection of kV (kilovolts) based on the topogram and then adjusts the mA (milliamps) to obtain optimized image quality,” says Wendy Kreider, CT product manager at Siemens. “The majority of patients benefit from lower kV and thus lower dose; however, CARE kV can also be especially useful when scanning large patients, who may actually need a higher kV. That’s why it’s about getting the right dose, not just the lowest dose.”
Number games
Besides the dose management that can be done with the scanners themselves, monitoring dose with software can also help facilities identify inconsistencies and problem areas.
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Often, dose volume varies from machine to machine or radiologist to radiologist.
“How do you ethically send patients to a scanner that has a lower dose footprint versus sending another to one that has a higher dose footprint?” says Satrajit Misra, the senior director for the CT business unit at Toshiba. “So it becomes a huge technical and ethical challenge, to ensure standardization off dose reduction.”
DoseMonitor, the dose management software from PACSHealth, includes in its latest release the ability to report dose by technologist.
“They’re not going to like that, but it lets facilities really drill into the details,” says Mike Battin, COO PACSHealth.
An example report from ScannerSide.
ScannerSide, a new dose management software company based out of New York’s Stony Brook University Medical Center, helps facilities manage workflow by showing which scanners are the most active, and in what areas extra help might be needed.
But even if facilities monitor dose, numbers by themselves may not mean much.
“It seems inherently obvious that if you do an X-ray or CT of a knee, the radiation dose will be much lower on the patient compared to a chest, but just looking at the numbers that come from the machine, you can’t understand that difference,” says William Moore, chief of thoracic imaging at Stony Brook and co-founder of ScannerSide.
ScannerSide automatically captures dose information for each scan and stores it in a cloud-based platform. It can then compare the amount of dose for that particular test with dose trends from facilities around the country to create a graph of dose averages.
