Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The American College of Radiology (ACR) has taken a big step toward getting radiology's house in order regarding tracking radiation dose. The ACR today unveiled its new Dose Index Registry, a centralized database that will enable imaging facilities to better track how much dose they're delivering to patients during CT scans.
The fact that radiology has no centralized, simple method for tracking radiation dose has long been the specialty's Achilles' heel, opening the door to more intrusive government regulation at both the state and federal levels. Now, imaging sites will be able to upload anonymized dose information for all their CT exams, allowing them to compare their performance to local and national benchmarks.
The ACR's move could help show government regulators that radiology is serious about making radiation dose more transparent and trackable. Learn more by clicking here, or visit our CT Digital Community at ct.auntminnie.com.
PET/CT directs radiation therapy
In other news, we're featuring a pair of stories this week in our Radiation Oncology Digital Community on how PET/CT is being used to make radiation oncology treatments more precise.
Our first article comes from this week's European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO) meeting in London, where Dutch researchers reported on their use of FDG-PET/CT to analyze non-small cell lung cancer tumors prior to radiation treatment. The group found that PET/CT can help locate areas in tumors that might be radioresistant and, thus, should receive a higher dose of radiation. Get the rest of the story by clicking here.
In related news, German researchers found that PET/CT with a novel radiopharmaceutical, F-18 fluoroethylcholine (FEC), could be used in a similar fashion, but this time with prostate tumors. They used FEC-PET/CT to direct boosts of radiation higher than the 60 Gy considered to be a standard treatment level.
Find out what they discovered by clicking here, or visit our Radiation Oncology Digital Community at radiation.auntminnie.com.
